wine users - Jan 2012 - Wine problems after OS upgrade - possible causes?

Hello!

I'm at my wits end with regard to the following problem: after I upgraded my
Linux distribution, no windows program running with wine (either 1.2 or 1.3)
that changes the graphic mode would run anymore. It is quite possible that I
inadvertently changed something in my configuration at some point, though I
believe that I by now have tried everything. I'd rather not post specific
error messages from wine at this point, since I got widely different ones in the
process of trying. Rather, I'd tell the story of what happened here and hope
that somebody could give me a hint about *possible* causes and help me to get on
track investigating the root of the problem.

A couple of month ago, I was running Ubuntu 10 (not the LTS version) and I could
happily and for the most part without problems play games like Wizardry 8,
Fallout, Baldur's Gate and even Morrowind with Wine. (Once my problems
started I googled for an error message and found a forum post according to which
things just wouldn't work with my graphic card, an Intel 82865G Integrated
Graphics Controler. Since things run smoothly once with this hardware, this
can't be the problem. ... Well, writing this makes me think ... but I get to
that below.)

Then I got a new wide screen monitor and with some of the games I got problems
with the mouse pointer on the screen. Since I play rather rarely, I didn't
pay much attention and just refrained from playing games at all.

Then I upgraded my operating system to Lubuntu 11.10. And things stopped working
altogether. In some cases, like Wizardry 8, the program crashes with an error
message (but, since I own more than one copy of that game I'm not 100% sure
that this is the exact same setting that run under Ubuntu 10), in other cases
the screen would just freeze or go black and then freeze.

Since I have a cold now, I'm staying at home, in a very bad mood, and
I'm desperately looking for a diversion from my sickness-induced self-pity.
I event went as far as downgrading my operating system. Ubuntu 10 can't be
downloaded anymore, so I went for Xubuntu 10.04 LTS. Same problem. I wondered
that maybe this was something particular to the "light weight" Ubuntu
distributions, since they might be using a very different graphic setting. So I
upgraded again to Ubuntu 11.10. Same problem. I switched to Lubuntu 11.10 again,
since this is my operating system of choice.

Shall I just post the error messages from one of the games, with more details of
my Wine settings? Or can somebody already spot the fundamental problem in this
puzzling story? Could it be that my old operating system just used some generic
card driver that was slow but reliable? (Then again, I had no luck with Xubuntu
10.04 LTS, either.) If so, which is it and how do I change it back temporarily?

Thanks for any help
    Oliver

> Then I upgraded my operating system to Lubuntu 11.10. And things stopped
working altogether. In some cases, like Wizardry 8, the program crashes with an
error message (but, since I own more than one copy of that game I'm not 100%
sure that this is the exact same setting that run under Ubuntu 10), in other
cases the screen would just freeze or go black and then freeze.

Exactly what "things" stopped working? Is it only the games you
installed, or are Wine's builtin apps (winecfg, notepad, etc.) also failing?

Did you reinstall your graphics driver after upgrading? Not doing so is a common
cause of problems.

If your system is 64 bit, have you installed all the necessary 32 bit 
libraries? Forgetting to do so is another common cause of problems.

Did you reinstall your games to a clean wineprefix after upgrading? If you
haven't, try that.

Are your using the latest development release of Wine? If not, upgrade, and
reinstall your games.

If you still have problems after doing all that, pick a game, and post console
output from trying to run it.