[Bug 7285] winecfg hangs forever in creation of .wine subdirectory

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7285

--- Comment #31 from Giel van Schijndel   2008-12-27 09:24:42 ---
> This indicates serious problem in your kernel. Please open bug with your
> distro, not Wine.

I just got this problem again today. After some digging and doing an
strace I discovered that it's neither a problem with my kernel nor wine.
> The only possible cause of that on Wine side would be hung I/O with some
> storage device. Are all your HDDs, CD-ROMs functioning properly?

My CD/DVD-ROM drive (Pioneer DVD-120S) in combination with HAL seemed to
be the problem. Apparently HAL would lock up whenever it tried to poll
my drive's status. As a result *all* applications trying to open
/dev/hdb (blockdevice associated with my drive) would lock up.

Disabling device polling with a config snippet like this fixed the
problem:
/etc/hal/fdi/policy/disable-hdb-polling.fdi:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="block.device" string="/dev/hdb">
      <merge key="info.addons" type="strlist"></merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>