Recently I upgraded a piece of software on my system called Synergy. This software allows one keyboard and mouse to control input on two or more machines via a network connection -- not dissimilar to VNC, except that only the keyboard and mouse input is forwarded, nothing with video, et cetera, and that it lets you mouse back and forth as if you were using a dualhead configuration on one box.
Anyhow, the problem is as follows: when using Synergy, I'm no longer able to use text input in wine at all. This applies to both winehq and crossover, winex appears to be unaffected. Originally, I thought this was a problem with Synergy itself, but upon asking the developer about it, I received notification that it was an X11 bug that wine wasn't working around. The technical details are as follows:
"the X11 bug is subtle: if client A creates two windows X and Y where Y is a child of X and selects for key events on window X, it expects to receive key events that occur in either X or Y (the events in Y propagate up to the nearest ancestor that has selected for the event). if another client B (synergy) comes along and selects for key events in Y then not only will B receive key events from Y (as expected) but key events in A will no longer propagate from Y to X and A won't see the events. that is, when B selects for events on window Y it changes the behavior of client A. this is just wrong."
One of the guys in #winehq on freenode (TD) said to send this to wine-devel, so here it is. I'm not sure if any more information is required. The site for Synergy is http://synergy2.sourceforge.net. Any 1.1.x release should demonstrate the problem for you. I'm hopeful that this will be an easy problem to work around as winex is working around it, but I'm not sure how similar or dissimilar the trees are in this area.