wine users - Nov 2008 - Lego Star Wars and Spore are running slow suddenly.

I upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, and Wine 1.1.8 some time last week, and then
reinstalled Spore to give it some play.  It worked fine for a couple of days,
but now I'm in the space stage and the game is incredibly sluggish.

This wasn't happening beforehand, it was running fast and marvellously
smooth until I tried to stop a war on my home planet.  This appears to be a
recurring theme, and I think it has something to do with the graphics.  It
doesn't seem to fix in safe mode or with Compiz disabled, and it isn't
just confined to Spore.  Lego Star Wars II is also running incredibly slowly
when before it was running fine.

I have a Nvidia 7300GS with the almost-latest driver (177.80), and I'm
running both with OSS sound and padsp to avoid PulseAudio conflicts.  As I say,
this only started after I upgraded both my OS and my Wine version, but plenty of
time afterwards that I still used both with minimal problem.

Any ideas?  Where can I look for ideas on what is going on?  It appears to be a
graphics problem, as none of the planets load in Spore until I'm trying to
land on them, and LSWII just slows to a crawl.  Music and sound is still fine,
though.

Thanks!

Bad news padsp only works as a performance work around with pulseaudio with some
versions of it.  Yep check what you system has updated.  Try sound disabled in
winecfg ie all drivers unticked.

I would expect a war would cause a lot of audio to go threw pulse audio quicky. 
Some versions of pulseaudio  have the nasty side effect of  causing long lasting
CPU load to
after a stack of audio goes threw it.

Compiz defects are creative.  Disable Compiz then restart X11 by some means. 
Only way to be sure its not upto anything.

Next is kernel glxinfo and make sure direct rendering is there.   Yes I have
seen cases where updating Ubuntu ends up back on the old nv driver with software
rendering.