[Wine] world of warcraft drops to 1 FPS after runing for a while

[truxton]

Dear wine users,

I have run wow under wine successfully for a while on my old computer,
but recently I upgraded my system, and I am expreiencing a baffling
problem : WoW runs great for a while, but after about 10 minutes, it
drops down to 1 FPS.  This corresponds with the cpu usage of WoW.exe
jumping from about 60% to 100%.  It feels to me like the game switched
from using nvidia openGL to software GL.  Is this possible?
The mouse cursor response is very choppy (1FPS) in the wine/wow window.

My system :
  2 x xeon quad core at 3.0 Ghz
  16 GB ram
  Nvidia GeForece 9800 GX2 with 1GB ram
  Ubuntu 8.04 64 bit
  kernel.org linux-2.6.26.3 (x86_64)
  wine-1.1.2 (also tried wine-1.0)

I reinstalled wow from scratch, no UI mods, all video settings are
turned to their lowest value.  sound is disabled.  registry is set
to disable GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object.  WoW.exe is started with
the "-opengl" argument.

To reproduce:
It seems fairly random when this will happen during normal play,
but I've found a way to consistently reproduce the problem :
  (0) run wow in windowed mode
  (1) log in to one character for a few seconds (200 FPS is just fine)
  (2) log out and switch realms to another realm
  (3) log in to a character for a few seconds (also FPS is fine)
  (4) log out and switch back to original realm
  (5) leave it there at the character selection menu
  (6) switch to another virtual desktop, and browse the web for a couple minutes
  (7) go back to wow, and notice that the graphics are very choppy
  (8) log into some character and see FPS is very low (1 FPS or so)

I've tried using schedtool to set processor affinity, and scheduling
priority.  This doesnt affect my problem.

Can anyone suggest a method for debugging this problem?
Is there a way to see if hardware GL is currently in use?
Does wine/WoW detect loss of mouse focus and try to reinit GL?

Thanks,

-Truxton