At some point last week, freetype update broke something in wine.
Couldn't get it to work on the patched system no matter what.
I have multiple systems and all wine packages I had tried worked on unpatched system while failing on patched one.
Tested 1.6.2 from sourceforge and the ones from alien repository and I have compiled 1.7.39 from source.
All of them resulted in long delays on wine startup and none of them worked correctly on fully updated 32bit install.
No idea where it went south, perhaps I incorrectly patched the system, as I was in the middle of something at the time.

Anyway, I have adapted the 1.6.2 slackbuild script to build wine 1.7.39 but it still failed with the same result..
Until I downloaded freetype 2.5.5 source, cleaned up all freetype from the system and recompiled both fontforge and wine.
Maybe I had multiple freetype libraries installed or something, still a mistery, but I guess it's no longer a problem.

I'm not entirely sure but perhaps it was something in the patch that may have changed functionality of some sort.
(guessing) Generally patches are helpful. What changed things in that patch is what I'd try to find out.
Maybe a bug?

I've seen updates break things before.
Maybe the update broke how Wine see's the lib's in freetype?

Or maybe the lack of some libraries?

If freetype 2.2.5 is working correctly I honestly don't know how to solve that mystery. (still want to know why)
You may never know what caused it to go south.

My first guess was missing libraries so I reconfigured it like this to narrow it down:

No matter what flags I used it always froze and output was something like retrying in 60s.
It is quite possible that I did installpkg without removing the old freetype instead of upgradepkg.
Anyway, it's properly patched now and it seems to be working fine.
I just posted it because I thought maybe someone has run into same problem in the past.

Glad to hear it's working for you now.

Thanks for the post.