Although, the averusbh826d.ko driver was causing the lockup with the OLDER version of WINE, I'm no longer experiencing lockups with WINE 1.1.44 with the SAME version of Avermedia's driver! So, the problem was due to WINE (at least partly) after all! I understand that WINE 1.1.44 has new audio code for OpenAL which likely fixed the problem with the hard lockups ...
