Yeah, I eventually slaughtered all the music in Deluxe; it was only down for some of my mods, not the whole lot of them, hence the discrepancy. I also found out about the command line available since 1.39 in the meantime (thanks to the Wine AppHQ, where I should post about SEIV since the current information is bogus), but it won't help me for setting up games. Bleh.
It isn't a problem solely with the game, though, as 1.94 worked fine previously even on the mods that did have the CD music enabled. I suspect it could be a new bug introduced with Wine, since I was running 20050523 (if memory serves) previously. Debian Stable => Unstable replaces most packages though, so I cannot really pinpoint the problem.
I have no interest in using Cedega, and Wine itself isn't quite my cup of tea. Still, compiling them does not take too long (finding the Cedega stuff is almost the longer of the two)... but if I liked compiling programs left and right, I guess I would be using a different distro, and incidentally a better cooling system.
