An example folks can see might help. A short one of two or three lines that shows what you are doing and what rudeness your system is giving you in return. It might help if you also said which applications you have tried. It might also help if you said which version(s) of Wine+Ubuntu worked (seems Wine 1.0.0 with Ubuntu 8.04 doesn't). How did you try to uninstall and reinstall Wine ? DId you delete your .wine directory, create a new one and reinstall your applications ?