I figured out why it was crashing. If anyone was having a similar problem, here is what I did:

It seems that I was using the wrong driver, which was Xv. I was fooled because it worked about 50% of the time, and that is what the install automatically selected for me. The X11 (XImage/Shm) works just great. However, you will not be able to run fullscreen unless you run gmplayer with the -zoom option. If you don't have the gui, I think you run something like mplayer -vo x11 -zoom otherwise gmplayer -zoom and select X11 driver from preferences. You may also need to enable frame dropping if fullscreen runs slowly.

actually winamp5 does work under wine - everything works beautifully except the media library.

I would much rather use native linux programs too, but winamp5 is the only program that I can get to stream Shoutcast video. - that's why I wanted winamp - now if I can only get that media library to work.....