Waterfoul I feel your pain.
Unfortunately I followed "helpful" suggestions on other forums (not XBMC!) such as "just uninstall Pulse using these commands..." from people with more ignorance than knowledge and it completely messed-up my OS as Pulse is quite tightly bound into most current Debian derivatives.
It's also completely unnecessary.
There's a much simpler solution to this problem which I stumbled across by accident. At least is works well for me on an Intel NUC running Mint 16 Petra with Cinnamon and hopefully it will work OK for you too.
Go into the menu editor for your particular Debian distro eg by right-clicking on the Menu button, selecting Configure and then clicking on Menu Editor.
Find the XBMC entry - typically under the Sound & Video submenu - and select Properties.
Change the command line entry from "xbmc" to "pasuspender -- xbmc"
Make sure you include the double dash (--) for safety. It just means "everything that follows is the command to be executed with Pulse suspended".
Save and you can now run XBMC without PulseAudio. Connect your system connected to your target audio device (eg, TV or home cinema amp) then go to XBMC Audio settings under System and change both the output devices at the bottom of the screen to something like HDMI PIO .... In my case it names my surround sound amp.
Et voila! You can now play XBMC without any major mods to your OS and without any of the constraints imposed in trying to do a pass-through PulseAudio.
Even better, Pulse simply resumes when you exit XBMC so, for example, I also have SqueezeLite installed on my media server which plays quite happily through Pulse both before and after running XBMC!
Incidentally a manual way of achieving the same effect is to install pavucontrol (PulseAudio Volume Control) and turn Pulse off in the Configuration menu before running XBMC, but that's a bit clunky compared with using pasuspender as you have to turn Pulse on again to use other apps such as Logitech Media Server.
Hope that helps!