The performance might be because another copy of wine is still running and hogging memory. To make sure no wine instances are running: $ wineserver -k Check memory and CPU usage: $ top With only 512MB (and usually over half that to run the desktop) you may have to stop a bunch of services, run a lighter desktop or enable a bigger swap to run some games. I can't explain it better than "man swapon", "man mkswap"
