So I finally figured out how to register for this forum -- this is MUCH easier than using the mailing list! I really appreciate everyone's help. I didn't read this most recent post until now (thank you though. The explanations were good), but I went ahead and blasted my wine environment this morning per dsent's suggestion. As stated previously, I just did the apt-get autoremove wine, rm -rf ~/.wine, and then cleaned out the wine entries in ~/.local/share and ~/.config I then reinstalled Wine 1.1.20 (apt-get install wine), and then reinstalled the Orange Box and applied ONLY the following changes: 1) passing -dxlevel and -heapsize to Steam 2) using WINDEBUG=-all 3) switching from Compiz to Metacity The difference is astounding. I'm operating normally on maps in the 50-60 FPS range, though it does occasionally drop to about 20 something. I even saw it hit 200+ at one point. It still does occasionally have the problem where it drops to single digit frame rates, but it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often. I added the Direct3D registy key back and performance noticeably worsened. I had all of the 7 or 8 different values in there so I'm not sure which one (or combination) specifically is making it worse, but it's running so well at this point I don't think I need to do any further investigation. The only key I might consider adding back is the VideoMemorySize key. I'll see if that helps I guess, but I don't feel like I want/need to try all combinations of them at this point. Thank you all for your suggestions -- this really helped! I thought I had noticed a considering performance hit since I first installed Steam but then I thought I was just being paranoid. It turns out I was not; the more I tried to tweak the game the more I was actually slowing it down. I don't plan on installing DX 9.0c this time either. ;) One last little tip, I stuck the following line in my ~/.gnomerc file: > > fusion-icon & > This way, whenever I login to gnome the icon is launched automatically for me. :) Thanks again!
