[Wine] Conflicts between kde and wine games - workaround

[doctordruidphd]

I'm posting this message because I discovered that there appear to be serious video conflicts between some games running in wine, and the kde desktop. Specifically, I have been unable to get "The Witcher Enhanced Edition" to run without severely distorted video. I have both gnome and kde desktops on my system (kUbuntu jaunty-9.04). Today I tried running the game in gnome, and was surprised to find that it worked almost perfectly (the friend/foe rings still don't show up, but that's a minor issue).
What I found is that if compositing "screen effects" are turned on in kde-4.2 or higher, there are major video problems with the game. Those problems go away if the "effects" in SystemSettings>Desktop>EnableDesktopEffects are turned off. This is a little surprising, because gnome also uses compositing effects, but I believe that gnome uses compiz, while kde has its own internal effects drivers. It's also odd that other games seem to work fine in kde with effects turned on; not at all sure why Witcher is different, but there it is.
So for others who may be having video problems, if you are running kde, make sure the effects are turned off.