http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9839
--- Comment #5 from Kai Blin blin@gmx.net 2007-10-11 02:25:21 --- There are some good reasons why distros set up your hostname to point at a loopback address. Assuming your computer gets it's IP address via DHCP, the IP address usually keeps changing. Also, more and more people use laptop computers these days, and don't have network connectivity while traveling. In those cases you want to make sure the hostname actually resolves to an address programs can use. Lots of Unix programs were written with static IP addresses in mind.
This turns out to be a problem for Windows programs that were written by people who did not know about BSD socket "best practices". Those programs try to handle binding to an IP address themselves instead of binding to the "ANY" IP address and letting the computer take care of the routing. Many of those programs will fail on Windows if there are two active network cards and you want to play over the one that was initialized first.
I have yet to come up with a good solution to this that doesn't require people changing their /etc/hosts file.