wine users - May 2012 - Half-life 2 with steam freezes at intro screen (stable/dev)

I tried with Wine 1.4 and Wine 1.5.4.

I now am back to Wine 1.4 because it's the stable version and this game
should be working for a long time since it's old. I have winetricks (version
0.0+20120512+svn814-1 from the Debian repositories - I compiled Wine itself from
the upstream source here into a deb file) installed. I'm not entirely
certain I did everything correctly so please don't omit simple questions if
you think they apply.

It freezes at the intro screen and I do not mean the login menu but rather the
valve thing that says "powered by source" after the part with the
black guy that has a valve on the back of his head.

I'm using Debian amd64 testing/wheezy. Xonotic and 0ad work perfectly
(proprietary Nvidia driver for the GTS 450 in use) so I don't think the
graphics driver is the issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!

Just to add, it works in Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64).

Try running this command in terminal before starting Steam and Half-Life 2:

echo 0|sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope

This resolves the issue with Portal 2 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and maybe it will work
for your problem. If this works please add a comment to relevant bug report:
Many apps crash on Ubuntu 12.04 (ptrace broken again)
(http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30410)