Thanks dimesio, fully sorted! What is that "deadbeef" all about? What is it doing there? It seems to be an Ubuntu thing because I tried installing Kindle 1.8 in Fedora and in Suse (vmware), both worked fine. In Xubuntu (vmware) it installed Ok but crashed WINE on initial run (included in install) and the "deadbeef" had reappeared. Once removed, Kindle ran OK. Or is it a kernel v3 thing? As for wineprefix, that seems to be a QT4 thing - am I wrong? I'm using Gnome, not KDE, though Kindle worked perfectly in OpenSuse.
