after a whole bunch of head banging, I finally found out what is causing wine to crash (though I don't know what the fix is, but I figure I should ask first before doing more head banging.
It turns out there are strange things happening in two places.
The first problem is that it fails to work when compiled with the XFree86 (4.1.0) includes/libraries, but works if you compile/link against the openwindows libraries (or, at least, it works HERE). Note that the X server that is running is 4.1.0. I suppose this might be a threading issue (given how notoriously unsafe X is for multitheading).
The second problem is that I could only get it working with the openwindows libraries if I truncate my font paths. So it looks like something goes awry when you have a LOT of fonts in the font path. When I started wine up with only 2 font dirs in my fontpath, it came up fine. My initial guess would be something to do with malloc/sbrk and all the mapping that is done with the dlls, but that's pure speculation on my part.
Any comments?
-r