running mIRC

[Adam Ingerman]

hi all

I read that programs shouldn't run much slower than they do in windows, but 
mIRC certainly does for me...
in windows, updating a screen-worth of information goes relatively quickly, 
but when done in wine, it takes longer. I looked at `top`, and found that 
wine was using about 1.5x the amount of CPU that mIRC would in widows 
(nothing else running in wine), and the X server was taking about the same 
amount again... is it usual for X to use a lot, or could I have config 
errors, or is it something that could be a bug?
also with mIRC, most of the config files are loaded, but one (and maybe others 
that I haven't noticed, but as far as I can tell it gets the rest), 
control.ini, is not, nor does it get saved to disk. it does work in windows. 
are there settings I could look into in wine config to make it more likely to 
load? (like maybe if mIRC has a different internal capitalization of the file 
name, or it expects file access flags or something, I dunno)
third part, trying to load the help files (windows format, .hlp) doesn't do 
anything, I'm assuming because wine isn't ready to load them... are there 
tools readily available to load them? or just as good, to convert .hlp to 
some other format I can make use of?

since I'm on a low-end system (p200, anyone?), are there special options I can 
use to tell wine to take it easy on the system?

I currently have wine running with a non-windows setup, as a test, since using 
the windows partitions was a lot slower (for startup and running), and it 
worked, so I stuck with it.
mIRC 6.03
wine 20030709 built from source on slackware 8.1/9.0 (started with 8.1 
packages, some are 9.0)
the windows I was using is a Win ME install, kept up to date with latest 
patches and all.
I don't want to d/l the binary package, it's a bit huge for my dial-up, but if 
there was a file with the compile options and list of other software linked 
in, I'd probably use that

TIA
Adam

seemingly relevant excepts from wine.conf (unrelated config and comments 
removed for bandwidth-saving reasons):

[wine]
"GraphicsDriver" = "x11drv"
"ShellLinker" = "wineshelllink"

[DllOverrides]
"*" = "builtin, native, so"		;<--no other settings here

[x11drv]
"AllocSystemColors" = "100"
"PrivateColorMap" = "N"
"PerfectGraphics" = "N"
;;"ScreenDepth" = "16"
;;"Display" = ":0.0"
"Managed" = "Y"
"Desktop" = "N"
"UseDGA" = "Y"
"UseXShm" = "Y"
"DXGrab" = "N"
"DesktopDoubleBuffered" = "N"
"TextCP" = "0"
;; "XVideoPort" = "43"
;;"Synchronous" = "Y"

[Tweak.Layout]
"WineLook" = "Win98"

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