Stable version of wine?
 

Any advice as to a good release of wine? Alas, the last several releases no longer support the programs I run. I run mostly emule, winmx, and bbftp serve (Bullet Proof Ftp Server). They stopped working at about 0.9.something. I'm working back through the .9.x releases to find one where they work, but so far no luck.

sadly there aint any "stable" version of wine. the develpers are adding new functionality so fast that several times old functions are reported broken. take my case for example, im a maintainer at the wine application database for the game star trek - elite force. since the last 3 releases of wine i have been unable to get he game started even when just a few releases back i was able to give it a platinum rating because of how beautifully wine was able to handel it.
your best bet is to wait until a new version comes out that runs it or to get hold of the older versions and use them only.

Don't fix a working thing. If you found a version of wine that works with the apps you're using, don't think about updating it unless there is something that doesn't work and you just can't live without. Updating should only be done if something is completely broken, not just for having the latest version..

Have you tried everything you could to make the programs run? The wine documentation has some tips for things you can try. Varying your .dll settings especially can make a difference. Set up the winedebug=+loaddll environment variable so you can see which .dll's it hangs on, and you have access to native versions try those instead.

I can't even get winecfg to run. I've uninstalled/reinstalled. I'm wondering if something is wrong with the package, or my install?

winecfg
wine: Unhandled page fault on write access to 0x003ffd80 at address 0x60e67103 (thread 0009), starting debugger...
Unhandled exception: page fault on write access to 0x003ffd80 in 32-bit code (0x60e67103).
Register dump:
CS:0023 SS:002b DS:002b ES:002b FS:1007 GS:0000
EIP:60e67103 ESP:0034e518 EBP:0034e880 EFLAGS:00210212( - 00 - RIA1)
EAX:0034e9b0 EBX:60e6eff4 ECX:60e662e0 EDX:00000001
ESI:003ffbe0 EDI:60017020
Stack dump:
0x0034e518: 0034e558 60e6d85c 0034e558 0034e554
0x0034e528: 00000000 00000000 0000eb58 00000005
0x0034e538: 00001000 00000001 0000ee5c 60017020
0x0034e548: 60e6f1b4 60e6f1b8 0034e7d8 0000001e
0x0034e558: 46203823 53206972 31207065 3a343020
0x0034e568: 303a3931 44432033 30322054 60003630
0200: sel=1007 base=7ffdc000 limit=00001fff 32-bit rw-
Backtrace:
=>1 0x60e67103 pthread_initialize+0x293 in libpthread.so.0 (0x60e67103)
2 0x60e6d7d5 __do_global_ctors_aux+0x25 in libpthread.so.0 (0x60e6d7d5)
3 0x60e62aa2 _init+0x12 in libpthread.so.0 (0x60e62aa2)
4 0x6000c3af _dl_init+0x25f in ld-linux.so.2 (0x6000c3af)