[Wine] Randomly and horribly slow

[schmidtbag]

Just as a heads up, I spent days researching this problem before asking, so I hope to not be wasting anyones time.  I also asked on the Ubuntu forums with no replies, so I figured it must be a tricky issue that only the creators of Wine can answer.

Some info you may want:
I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04.  It works perfectly fine, including 3D.  My computer is a 2.2GHz P4, 768MB of RAM, with a Radeon 9200SE.  I am dual booting with Windows XP.  Yes, I know its bad but I only plan on using this computer for work and its plenty good enough for that.  (BTW, this computer is made entirely out of spare parts, I paid nothing for it directly.)

Anyways, I installed Wine and the first program I tried was Trillian (an instant messenger) and it was on my Windows XP partition.  Trillian has more options and features than Pidgin so I preferred to use that.  It ran fine, so I figured I'd install it.  So I ran the setup.  I don't remember if I changed anything before I ran the setup but ever since, every single program I run with Wine, even paint, goes horribly slow.  It doesn't matter if its 3D or if its practically non graphical at all.  I uninstalled Wine, removed the hidden files in my home folder, and even updated it to 1.0 but it still won't do anything.  I disabled compiz and that made an unnoticeable performance difference.  I tried disabled as many features I could find in Wine's controls, which also did nothing.  I did download the recommended packages, I tried Crossover, and I tried PlayOnLinux.  None of those did anything.  glxgears has a framerate range of about 850, which IMO sounds reasonable for this crappy hardware and should be good enough to handle any basic 2D program, but I could be wrong.

What can I do about this?  I don't want to reinstall Ubuntu, I just finished setting up everything just as I want it.  Any input is much appreciated.