[Wine] Team Fortress 2 losing priority/ how to fix?

[RemiParks]

Specs:
Ubuntu 10.10 64bit
Nvidia 260 GTX driver ver. 260.19.44
4 gig ram
onboard sound

wine ver. 1.3.16

So TF2 runs great, in dx9 mode its all good. 
THAT IS until something pops up on my desktop in the form of a notification or if I needed to alt+tab to something.

I'm running it windowed at 1280x800 through the steam interface, the winecfg is not configured to run in a simulated desktop space.

The once stable and sufficient frame rate I was getting prior to the notification (be it music, messenger client, alt+tab) seems to shut off all priority from TF2 because I'm reduced to 1 frame every 9 seconds.

The only way to rectify the situation is to quit out of the HL2.exe and then just wait for the sync and start TF2 back up which is back to running in good shape.

I can turn off my various notifications but I'd kinda like to be able to coexist with them if at all possible.