[SOLVED] XFCE4 Pulseaudio crashed badly....volume indicator disappeared

[linux-dummie]

Posting this for anyone looking here with the same problem, maybe this'll help.

(Running 18.2-xfce on an older athlon 3x, 2gb ram, w/built-in Realtek HQ sound.)

For whatever reason that I don't know, perhaps after trying to open smplayer, I suddenly lost pulseaduio completely. Rebooting didn't help. I tried to open pavucontrol but got the message:

Connection to Pulseaudio failed. Automatic retry in 5s.
In this case this is likely because PULSE_SERVER in the Environment/X11 Root Windows Properties or default-server in client.conf is misconfigured.

Tried several resets which I found online, but nothing.
Finally per online instructions, I uninstalled (purged) pulseaudio. From my own idea I also purged pavucontrol. Reinstalled all. Still got the same error and no pulseaudio.
Then also per online instructions I deleted all the files in the ~/.config/pulse folder and per the archwiki renamed ~/.config/xfce4/ and xfce4-session/ both with .bk. After reboot, pulse worked fine and also pavucontrol. Don't know which one of these actions actually fixed it.

However, though pulseaudio now worked, the volume indicator in the panel had disappeared. I went through a few hours of searching to try to find how to restore it. Finally found an old post at https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1987209 that suggested installing indicator-sound-gtk2 (which in Mint 18 also installed indicator-sound). I did so, and after reboot the volume indicator appeared again in the panel as normal.

As of now all audio seems working okay again. Weird. Never had such a difficulty with Mint before.