I've had confirmation now that, upon the enabing of certain sound
notifications in Gnome 2.24 on Gentoo, Orca will crash. Noteably if you
enable the option to play a sound when a button is clicked. The only way
around it that I've been able to find, which unfortunately means I have
to set up Orca again, is to blow away the /home/james/.gconf directory
and start it over. Fortunately that's not what I'd call a huge problem
for me at this stage, and I know what not to enable in future.

I'm curious, though, to know if this is addressed in a later version of
Gnome and/or Orca. If yes, it might be worth the trouble of upgrading,
in spite of the fact Gentoo doesn't list 2.26 as stable yet. As said
earlier, any feedback or additional information on this would be
appreciated. I'm CCing the Gentoo accessibility list as well, in the
event it turns out to be an OS specific problem.