wine users - Jan 2009 - wine causing system slowdown

After upgrading to a 64bit system with new hardware, running 3d games with wine
now results in my entire system becoming unresponsive until I kill wine
(wineserver -k). I am using Arch Linux with the bin32-wine package from AUR, and
have experienced this problem with wine 1.1.10, .12, and .13. Wine does use 100%
of a single core, but it did this with my previous system as well. I've
gotten this with both the 2.6.27 and 2.6.28 driver, with nvidia 177.82 and
180.22 drivers.

It's not anything to do with ~/.wine, because I tried installing Red Alert 3
to a new WINEPREFIX and I experienced the same problem with it. The other game
that freezes is EVE Online. Both EVE and RA3 worked fine with my previous 32bit
arch install.

Does anyone have any idea how I can fix this or what might be causing it?
I've been trying various things for the past two weeks with no success.

andrewyates wrote:
> After upgrading to a 64bit system with new hardware, running 3d games with
wine now results in my entire system becoming unresponsive until I kill wine
(wineserver -k).
> ...
> I've gotten this with both the 2.6.27 and 2.6.28 driver, with nvidia
177.82 and 180.22 drivers.

I think the problem is the nvidia driver (32bit on 64bit system) in combination
with wine.

You could have a look at these bugs and you could try the attached workarounds.
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10778
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15290

You could also have a look at the console output. There should be some
OUT_OF_MEMORY errors.

Also sometimes I got some kernel panics because the nvidia driver tries to free
some memory and hangs in an endless loop. Probably because it had allocated the
memory beyond the 4GB border.