Alsa Sound won't stay fixed in Wine
 

I'm using Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy with Wine 1.1.6 for software and a VIA VT8237A onboard sound card in conjunction with an Nvidia GeForce 7300GS video card.
I'm fairly new to using Ubuntu Linux and I'm trying to take it slowly, learning a little at a time, however, I've gotten used to how I had my windoze setup and I'm trying to configure what I can to make Linux the way I like it. I've installed Wine, and I was really happy with how the games worked. Until I discovered there was a different screensaver package I could install instead of the default Gnome one. One of those screensavers locked up the computer every time I tried to go into 'screensavers' to change it, so I opted to uninstall them all from Synaptic and install the Gnome ones back. This set my system back to the default resolution somehow, and I spent a few hours correcting that, then once I fixed that I discovered that the login screen had stayed the same (too small) resolution. I fixed that, then I wanted to do something a little less stressful, and tried to open up Diablo 2 on Wine. Only thing was, it had no sound. This had worked fine before, with no faults or errors, and they both still work fine, just no sound. I've tried several 'fixes' that I've located 'googling' that were within the last year or so, to no avail. Bear in mind, the rest of the computer still has sound, and apparently ALSA is working fine. Just not for Wine.
If it's 'fixed' by whatever method I do, it won't stay fixed. I can do winecfg and click the 'test sound' button and it might work for that, but by the time I get logged into either Guild Wars or Diablo 2, the sound no longer works.
I hope someone has a solution for me that sounds easy enough for me to do. I was using Mandriva Linux '08 before this, and when it updated to '09, I lost internet, printer, and hadn't a clew as to how to repair it, so I got Ubuntu instead. That was a week ago, more or less. Like I said before, I'm pretty much a Linux newb after using windoze for eight years.

One thing that worked for me is on the winecfg audio tab, at the bottom where it says 'Hardware Acceleration', I changed it to emulation, and haven't had any problems with Diablo II or anything else since.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Thanks for the info, but I just uninstalled wine and then reinstalled it. That actually worked. Another problem that crops up occasionally is that if I'm trying to use an application that has to access the My Computer portion of the wine directory, the application is unable to do so, and freezes up. I've been rebooting in order to make it able to access and this has worked consistently and also works when the sound quits as well.

I'm wondering if there is any other way to accomplish the same thing without rebooting the computer?

You might try configuring things differently on the Drives tab of winecfg. I had similar problems with my cd drive until I told wine that it was actually a cd drive and not a floppy or hard drive.

Will that prevent my having to reboot the OS every time I lose sound?