Speechd_up stopped working

[Igor Gueths]

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Hi all. I recently had to do an Fsck on my system since some Inodes decided to run away...Rather it was some bad blocks. They were fixed, or so I thought (the bad blocks all appeared within 
/usr). Ever since that point, Speechd_up says that it can't open /dev/softsynth. An ls -l /dev/softsynth gives me this: crw-r--r--  1 root root 10, 26 2005-02-09 21:43 softsynth

I can do an spd-say while Speech-dispatcher is running, and Flite works just fine. However, I get this in Speechd-up.log: [Wed Feb  9 21:46:10 2005] speechd: Speechd-speakup starts!
[Wed Feb  9 21:46:10 2005] speechd: ERROR! Unable to open soft synth device (/dev/softsynth)

Does anyone know why this might happen, considering that the softsynth device is properly created? I made sure to check that Sftsyn was compiled into my 2.6.6 kernel, which it appears to be. 
Does anyone have any ideas what might cause such strange behavior? Thanks!
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