Actually it looks like having fontforge installed *causes* the problem. Try removing /usr/local/share/wine/fonts or making it inaccessible.
The problem is due to an old version of fontforge. In Debian, version 0.0.20041218-0.1 generates incorrect ascent information for the Windows font header. Version 0.0.20051205-0.1 gets it right. For Debian users, 0.0.20051205-0.1 is only available in testing and higher. Unfortunately 0.0.20051205-0.1 depends on other things from testing (such as libc6 >= 2.3.5-1), so if you want to build on a pure Sarge system you will need to either do without fontforge, build it yourself, or find a backport somewhere.
Hi, I have: fontforge-20060125-6.fc5 installed. I also have every other font under the sun installed, as this is an "everything" install.
Removing or moving /usr/share/wine/fonts causes wine to refuse to generate .wine, and start up. In order for that to work, it seems wine requires the directory to exist, and for there to be at least one file in it (/usr/share/wine/fonts/* exists). Making a bogus file in there makes it work.
I can see fonts in winecfg, and fonts in the GTA installer in a newly created wine root. I haven't yet tried to install Steam in there. Using my old wine root, Steam still does not work. Otoh the GTA works with the old root.