After consultating with the #gstreamer irc channel on freenode found a solution/workaround to this, and the related rhythmbox bug. - rhythmbox uses gstreamer-0.10 but gstreamer-properties changes the settings for gstreamer-0.8 - so gstreamer-0.10 settings have to be set using gconf-editor - set the setting "/system/gstreamer/0.10/default/audiosink" in gconf to "alsasink buffer-time=-1" which will skip trying to set the buffer at all, and gst-launch-0.10 and hence rhythmbox will work.
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