wine users - Oct 2011 - What might affect keyboard input in a game under Wine?

Hi everyone - and I apologize in advance for the vagueness on this one.

I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit (fresh install).

One game that I normally submit test data for has suddenly lost the ability to
type. I can no longer enter a userid or password on it's login screen. (I
was able to do this in 11.04 64-bit with Wine 1.3.29.) The only keys that are
responsive now are the return and escape keys (which are used for navigating the
game's initial menus) The weird thing is that typing seems fine on other
games that I routinely play.

I've tried the game with Wine 1.3.29 through 1.3.31 with the same results.
Since typing was partially working in 1.3.29 (on Ubuntu 11.04) I'm willing
to entertain the idea that this is a distro problem and not one specifically
with Wine.

Having said that however I wanted to ask what things might affect keyboard input
in a game when it's running under Wine.

So far I've checked/unchecked all of the Window options in winecfg (no
change). I've tried running the game under Unity-2D, Unity, Gnome 3, and
fallback Gnome but still have been unable to type.  In Ubuntu 11.04 Unity-2D
(which I was using when typing last worked) used metacity. In 11.10 I believe
it's now using compiz. I tried using "metacity --replace" but that
didn't help either.

What are some other things that I can check that might interfere with Wine's
input handling - specifically with keyboard input? (mouse seems to work fine) My
next stop will be the Ubuntu forums but I need to identify the components to ask
about.

Thanks in advance!

I don't know; have you tried installing to a clean prefix? I know that Hype
the Time Quest needs a dinput override for the keyboard to work. Maybe give that
a shot? Shouldn't need it if it worked without it before, especially since
you said you went back and tried the version it worked in.

When it was working, was that 32-bit or 64-bit Ubuntu?

Also, are you compiling from source? You said you went back and tried some
versions, I'm assuming by compiling from source. Sometimes the binary
package just works better than when you try to compile from source.

What is this game?

Jake