One of the failures is mshtml:events which has started ahppening on the
11th of August.

What is mighty strange is that:
* There was no change to dlls/mshtml/tests/events.c around that time and
  testing with a pre-11th build still shows the failure.
* I did not change the VMs around that time (or any time past the 3rd of
  August). Also the failures started happening not only on some of my
  VMware VMs, but also on the Windows 2008 VMs of the TestBot.
* It does not seem that test actually accesses the network though I
  may be wrong there. Could it be a change on the Wine web server (I
  found no matching commit in the tools repository).
* The test started failing on Linux (64 bit only) and FreeBSD (32 bit)
  on the 15th which corresponds to the next commit round.

Testing this Windows 2000 and XP shows that the issue is that the
iframe_onreadystatechange_complete test triggers a 'You are about to
view pages over a secure connection' popup dialog which blocks the
process until it is answered, thus leading to the timeout.

So given that nothing changed in the VM (still starting from the same
snapshot), why did it start displaying this dialog on the 11th?

Here's a screenshot:
http://fgouget.free.fr/tmp/mshtml_events.png

--
Francois Gouget <fgouget@free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
                        question = ( to ) ? be : ! be;
                              -- Wm. Shakespeare