For what it's worth, I've been testing those troublesome games from Humongous with newer versions of Wine. Up until Nov. 9th, they worked fine. Afterwards, they started failing with a difficult to diagnose error message on startup, saying that the sound card was not detected. I tested this with OSS and ALSA sound drivers.
could you test whether the patch I just sent to wine-patches fixes your issues (symptoms are not the same as what I fixed, but it may be linked). it it doesn't work, please send me a -debugmsg +wave trace
A+