I don't watch the forums constantly, it's the last thing I check after reading wine-patches/wine-devel/wine-bugs. winetricks definitely does not send usage info unless the user opts in. To see whether the user opted in, do cat ~/.cache/winetricks/track_usage If that says "1", then the user opted in. When winetricks' gui first runs, it displays an opt-in dialog. You can see this by doing rm ~/.cache/winetricks/track_usage Try that now and see what happens! The user can always opt out by running winetricks --optout I can imagine one scenario which could cause the reported problem; perhaps the user pressed just the right key just as that dialog was coming up. (Sounds like another wishlist item for zenity - make it display the dialog for a few seconds before letting the user dismiss it.) The usage data is there so I can know which verbs are most popular, so I can make sure to not break them :-) Reported usage (from opted in users only) for the top 16 verbs during February was: 4609 d3dx9 3541 corefonts 3014 vcrun2005 2986 ie6 2678 dotnet20 2550 ie8 2502 gdiplus 2439 directx9 2421 winxp 2042 d3dx9_42 2035 vcrun2008 1981 ie7 1981 d3dx10 1969 vcrun6 1864 gecko 1840 d3dx9_36 Note that the competing wine frontend PlayOnLinux gathers usage stats from all users, not just opted-in users, so winetricks is more protective of privacy in this regard. POL stats are at http://www.aplu.fr/polistats/stats_2011.html#list_get_num and the numbers there are a lot higher, probably partly because they're for all POL users, but mine are only for winetricks users who opted in (possibly because of an unfortunate keystroke or mouse click during the opt-in dialog, as noted above).
