Volume icon missing after removing (and re-installing) pulseaudio

Question

I reinstalled PulseAdio beacause I my indicator-sound just disappeared, but it didn't help.

Strangely, I have installed indicator-sound and still don't have that sound control. Nay, I don't even have any settings in "Sound Settings":

I ran "Volume Control PulseAudio" from unity launcher and I got this:

So I ran start-pulseaudio-x11:

$ start-pulseaudio-x11 
Connection failed: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

What Can I do to fix it?

Answer 1

_{converted comment to answer}

Some pulse-audio issues can be resolved by resetting your pulseaudio configuration file then logging out and logging in to regenerate it automatically.

mv ~/.pulse ~/.pulse_backup

From your comment - this is exactly the case for your situation :)

Answer 2

I found out that in the login screen, I could change the volume but it was a session issue.

I typed:

sudo chown -R $USER /home/$USER  

and restarted. Now I have the control.