wine users - Dec 2010 - Dungeon Siege slow disk I/O

Yesterday after a lot of trial and error i found a way to get Dungeon siege to
install. I installed it in Windows 7 then rebooted to Ubuntu 10.04 to run it.
Because fo the way Dungeon Siege works this method is fine. It even asks the
user to agree to the EULA.

It is currently updated to the latest 1.11 version. Besides the commonly known
intro cut scene bug there is a major issue which has manifested. Disk I/O, most
notably saving and loading is very slow. 5 minutes+ for auto saving, and far
more than that for world loading.
I tested dungeon siege in Windows. This problem did not occur. I have also
tested other programs and games in Wine. this problem does not occur in them
either. This issue is a real show stopper. Any ideas would be appreciated.

For those who are interested, slow I/O and intro aside, Dungeon Siege runs in
Wine at a faster framerate and with far fewer graphical glitches than Windows 7.
So it's not all bad news.

I hope 1.11 is the game version.

Particular key things to even start going anywhere.

1 what filesystem are you on.  NTFS wine running programs from there have
particularly slow I/O in the insanely slow cat.  Native linux filesystem like
ext3 ext4 work far better.

2 What wine version

3 Have you tried with sound disabled.  (Yes wrong some games interface sound
when saving for some insane reason?  Maybe it speeds it up on windows)