http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11091
--- Comment #12 from James Jurack jorenko+wine@gmail.com 2008-06-10 08:20:00 --- I am 100% sure that exiting steam causes the problem to go away -- in fact I never see it completely go away until I have culled all related wine processes as well.
I am now running on wine 1.0-rc3 and still have the same problem.
I now also suspect that this may only affect the 64-bit build, as I first saw this after switching from 32-bit ubuntu to 64-bit. However, I've as of yet not had time to reinstall 32-bit to confirm this.