... One more thing: about 1 in 5 runs it turns out that wine does start. Never under strace, though.
/me smells a race condition.
I'll just add a "me too" to that one. I have not tried putting numbers to it, so I don't know whether it is 1 in 5. But I have already gotten accustomed to just rerunning a program that doesn't start up. This on RH9.
