Here's the skinny, I'm running Fedora 7, but I can reproduce this under Slackware as well.

Under normal operation, my Dell Inspriron's fans work fine. There's no fan module, and /proc/acpi/fan/ is empty, but they function properly.

Except when I'm running WINE. If I'm running, for example, StarCraft under WINE, the laptop turns into a little oven, the fans don't kick in no matter how hot it gets. It usually tops out around 61C, but outside of WINE the fans usually kick in before I hit low 50s C.

This is a Pentium M 1.8GHz, all intel hardware, fully supported in-kernel (with the exception of ipw2200 firmware (wifi)).

This looks to be a WINE issue, but is there something else I should be looking for, or is this a known issue?

Just a thought, but there might be a difference between heat raised by the CPU and heat raised by the graphics processor. The program you mentioned running under WINE sounds like a game, so I assume it heavily uses 3D graphics = heat. Have you tried generating heat with a graphics heavy program outside WINE, or alternatively generating CPU activity inside WINE without graphics?

The laptop fan sensors may not be detecting graphics generated heat, or be set to be more tolerant of heat in that area.

Bit of a long shot though :-)

Cheers,
-nick