[Wine] What might affect keyboard input in a game under Wine?

[dk]

Hi everyone - and I apologize in advance for the vagueness on this one.

I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit (fresh install).

One game that I normally submit test data for has suddenly lost the ability to type. I can no longer enter a userid or password on it's login screen. (I was able to do this in 11.04 64-bit with Wine 1.3.29.) The only keys that are responsive now are the return and escape keys (which are used for navigating the game's initial menus) The weird thing is that typing seems fine on other games that I routinely play.

I've tried the game with Wine 1.3.29 through 1.3.31 with the same results. Since typing was partially working in 1.3.29 (on Ubuntu 11.04) I'm willing to entertain the idea that this is a distro problem and not one specifically with Wine.

Having said that however I wanted to ask what things might affect keyboard input in a game when it's running under Wine.

So far I've checked/unchecked all of the Window options in winecfg (no change). I've tried running the game under Unity-2D, Unity, Gnome 3, and fallback Gnome but still have been unable to type.  In Ubuntu 11.04 Unity-2D (which I was using when typing last worked) used metacity. In 11.10 I believe it's now using compiz. I tried using "metacity --replace" but that didn't help either.

What are some other things that I can check that might interfere with Wine's input handling - specifically with keyboard input? (mouse seems to work fine) My next stop will be the Ubuntu forums but I need to identify the components to ask about.

Thanks in advance!