These could just be the usual known slow wineserver communication effects at work here, but I wanted to make sure you know about these issues on the CK list.
I suspect that the issue is much deeper than just the wineserver effects; Windows scheduling requirements are fundamentally different than the scheduling that the Linux kernel tries to supply, and the differences can be hard to troubleshoot.
Photoshop, for example, relies on the ability of a thread to Sleep for precisely 5 ms, and then wake up in a certain priority state. The Linux kernel inverts that (I forget the exact details, but we dug into this in great detail this past fall), and so the Photoshop thread has a great deal of difficulty. AFAIR, we had issues with the thread sleeping for 115 ms instead of 5 ms, and we alternately had problems with the thread starving other threads in the system, so that nothing else was being served.
On my todo list is an item to start a conversation with the Kernel guys about these scheduling differences, and to see if we can ask for a few tuning hooks to help us better match Windows. But I keep trying to goad Alexandre into doing it, and he keeps reminding me that I'm not supposed to bother him with anything until after the Window Manager rewrite is done... <grin>.
But they seem receptive right now, so maybe I'll see what I can do.
Cheers,
Jeremy