http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24064
--- Comment #25 from James epsilon72@cox.net 2010-08-27 00:04:58 --- This is turning out to be a pretty serious bug that affects a large number of games. If you find a game that is affected by this (this can be verified by using the environment variable WINEDEBUG=+relay, and if the games then work, it's related) then be sure to link their appdb pages to this bug.
I wish I had the programming/debugging skill to take a look at this problem and get it fixed....
I hope that one day we can get actual in-game overlay working for steam games.