[Wine] wine produces no output

[ProfCalculus]

Hi,
I have wine 1.01 running under Ubuntu 8.10. Until recently I was using it quite happily to run Windows console applications. Now, for no apparent reason, wine just quits and I get no output at all. This is the case for all .exes, not just one or two. For example:
prompt$ wine SomeWindowsApp.exe
prompt$
prompt$ wine cmd
prompt$
etc...
I am running Wine in the application's home directory.

If I run 'wine' by itself, I get the usual help message.
I have also tried winedbg and wineconsole, with the same results.
Finally I reinstalled wine (via apt-get) but the problem is unchanged.
Can anyone suggest what has gone wrong here please?