Wine stops working immediately after I restart

[joshwinehq]

I'm sure this is a stupid question but I need help. I've used Wine for a while now to run a rather obscure windows program without too many problems. For the past month or so it has become impossible though.

I'm currently on Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS noble and winehq-devel: Installed: 9.16~noble-1.

Every time I restart the PC wine no longer works and I need to re-install wine and then the program (which involves getting new login details from the program supplier etc which is very tedious).

When I restart and type Winecfg from a terminal it just seems to hang and eventually I must close the terminal. Then reinstall wine and the program.

Suggestions please!

[aschloegl]

I'd try these steps:

* Does killing wineserver make the the terminal responsive again?
wineserver -k
* killing any other wine-related processes (I use htop, but there are other approaches too)
* removing (renaming) the standard prefix (make sure wineserver is not running anymore)
mv ~/.wine ~/.wine.old
* start with a new wine prefix
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine.mynew
wineboot -i

[joshwinehq]

Sorry for the slow response to the excellent advice. Other field work kept me away from the screens and a quick response.
I realised after posting that actually sometimes "winecfg" does work and my programs do work but it seems only on a "random" basis, but they don't work everyday.

Using your suggestion "wineserver -k" did the trick and allowed winecfg to run and then my program to work after the usual hanging scenario!
What does this mean for my setup and how can I permanently fix it?

Thanks in advance!

[aschloegl]

"wineerver -k " kills wine, and you have a simpler way to go back normal (w/o the need to reboot). It does not fix any other problem. The program you are trying to run is obviously not fully supported yet by wine.

The next steps would be identifying which windows system call is used but not (properly) supported wine.
For these WINEDEBUG output log might be useful.
The error messages when wine started to hang, might be good starting points, to check whether other apps have a similar problem, and whether there is some workaround known.
On several cases, some winetricks might be helpful, but it depends on the type of error.

You can also send bug reports, details how to do this are described here:
https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Bugs
You might get feedback what workarounds you could try,
or eventually the missing fieature might be implemented in wine.

[joshwinehq]

It's not just the program, typing "winecfg" does nothing half the time and hangs and then I have to kill the terminal and wait a few hours or days till it decides to work after a couple of reboots.
Thanks again!