[Wine] Mouse problems in many games

[Acharn]

I've been searching every forum I can think of and have only found solutions for individual games, none of which are the ones I'm having a problem with. I have an Acer Aspire 1699, with an ATI Radeon 1550x graphics card, dual core CPU running at 1.8GHz. I'm running Ubuntu 11.04. So far I've had this problem with Black & White 2, Cities In Motion, Trainz 12, Hidden & Dangerous, and a few more which I wasn't really seriously interested in.

When the game starts up there is usually a pointer controlled by the mouse. Sometimes in the first stage this works. When I go on to the start of the game, the pointer responds very erratically, from a couple to several seconds after I've moved the mouse. The pointer will move a great distance, even though I've only moved the mouse a little. The direction the pointer moves is difficult to predict, although it's generally in the direction I move the mouse. This happens with games that are rated Platinum in AppsDB.

I have the open source (default) graphics driver installed, because ATI has not produced an updated driver since 2009. I tend to suspect the graphics driver, but suppose it could be the mouse driver -- I saw one recommendation to edit the /etc/x11/xorg.conf file. I find it hard to believe this problem is unique to me, so I must be searching the wrong key words. Any recommendations?