Huh. Well... it seems to have started working now. To the best of my knowledge I did the following (mostly random) things: 1) tried the command: padsp winecfg ... on the offchance Jemain was onto something * Googled some error messages I received about ALSA failing but tried none of the suggestions(!) I should have taken note of the messages... my apologies; One was about a PCM volume control failing to load and the other was about BT87x which I assume is the onboard sound on my ancient Soltek Motherboard * I tried toggling the sound output in Ubuntu's sound control panel to 'output' from 'duplex' * Ran explorer.exe, regedit.exe and hh.exe just to see what would happen * While regedit was still running, I tried changing the sound driver from ALSA - where it had defaulted, to OSS. I could see the settings changing in the Wine registry. * Back in the config dialog, I opened out the branches on the tree of options below OSS and clicked on the entries and then 'Test Sound' After that list of seemingly random clickery, somehow sound is working. The only major change was the 'duplex' to 'output', but I've since changed that back and sound in Wine is still working... and PulseAudio is still running. I may yet report back saying it's broken again, but we'll see. Or hear. Or something. :)