Michael,
So the cause of random mci time-out on test.winehq may as
well lay elsewhere. Like in PulseAudio? That may well be. PA in F11 made sound be more broken in Wine.
Is that your own experience or other people's reports?
My experience with PA in Ubuntu Intrepid -- it's not the newest Ubuntu at all -- is that it has been stable for several month now, to a point where I regularly forget to run "pactl exit" to stop it every time I log into Gnome as I did half a year ago.
Lastly, Wine has performed equally well in a PA, ALSA or OSS setting AFAICT. It's long ago that PA caused known bugs such as stuttering (in Hardy and Intrepid); they must have been fixed by a combination of changes in Wine and perhaps Ubuntu updates(?). Of course, YMMV.
One issue remains in Intrepid: Because Timidity was not modified for PulseAudio[*], it grabs the ALSA device when it starts, causing all subsequent PA clients to loose access to sound. So it is still advisable to issue "pactl exit" to let Wine (and Timidity) share ALSA well.
Regards, Jörg Höhle [*] or because PA was badly integrated? Why should every sound using package be modified when something like PA jumps into a distribution?!?