How to beat Wine?

Question

linux

Good afternoon, dear, in general, I suddenly ran into a problem, wine refused to work, although before everything was ok.
System:

[email protected]:~$ uname -a
Linux maksim 3.2.0-23-generic-pae #36-Ubuntu SMP Tue Apr 10 22:19:09 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[email protected]:~$ cat /etc/lsb-
lsb-base/            lsb-base-logging.sh  lsb-release          
[email protected]:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04 LTS"

wine version:

[email protected]:~$ wine --version
wine-1.5.7

I want to assure you that I have tried different ones.
What I did, I deleted everything related to wine, connected ppa repositories, cleaned cache apt and reinstalled. Nothing helps. I observe the following errors.
1. Double-clicking refuses to open *.exe programs
2. Trying to run winetricks shows the following

[email protected]:~$ winetricks 
------------------------------------------------------
wine cmd.exe /c echo '%ProgramFiles%' returned unexpanded string '%ProgramFiles%' ... can be caused a corrupt wineprefix, an old wine, or by not owning /home/maxim/.wine

3. When starting programs from the console, it gives the following errors, but the program starts.

[email protected]:~$ wine Data/useful/Soft/Ubuntu/putty.exe 
getting server_pid from lock 29468
wine: cannot get pid from lock (lock isn't locked)
err:process:start_wineboot failed to start wineboot, err 1359
fixme:actctx:parse_depend_manifests Could not find dependent assembly L"Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls" (6.0.0.0)
getting server_pid from lock 29468
wine: cannot get pid from lock (lock isn't locked)

Killed several hours on googling, but could not win.

Answer 1

I dug today with the same trouble for more than an hour.
I reinstalled different versions in different combinations dozens of times (fortunately, hardware does this in seconds).
The verdict is this: the
ubuntu-wine PPA has broken packages and dependencies (wine 1.3 depends on 1.4, 1.5 installs next to 1.4 fine, but 1.5 can kill 1.4 if 1.3 is installed, for company, so to speak ). And none of them worked for me today (before, it seems, it worked and was updated).
How to fix:

1) Remove all versions of wine and winetricks.
2) Disable the ubuntu-wine ppa
3) Update the list of packages (apt-get update)
4) Install wine (it will pull wine 1.4 and winetricks packages)
5) profit
6) Wait for wine 1.5 in the stable branch, and check from time to time for a new build in ppa (maybe fixed).

Answer 2

did you clean wine configs in home and /etc?

Answer 3

Wine has a WINEPREFIX environment variable (or something like that), maybe that's the issue? Does it point to the wrong directory?