Wine has mysteriously stopped working. I have decided to simple entirely remove and re-install wine, but before I do this I want to make sure that I will not loose any of the multitudes of files and programs I have saved and installed on Wine in the past.

Can I just backup "drive_c" and "dosdevices" inside the .wine foider, then entirely remove the .wine directory (rm -rf ~/.wine), install wine again, and then just plop the backed-up folders back in the directory? Would I be able to run the programs normally?

Also, since I am already writing this, I might as well add what I know about what went wrong with Wine.

I am on Ubuntu 12.04. Wine worked fine about a week ago, and mysteriously stopped working.

If I run winecfg.exe, the process runs (according to top command), but nothing appears on screen. It just takes up 100% of one of my CPUs. The same exact thing happens if I run Winetricks or try and run a .exe program in wine. A process appears in top, takes up CPU, but nothing happens.

If I run wine through terminal, the results are as follows:

user@computer:~/Downloads/SpaceEngine 0.97/system$ wine SpaceEngine.exe 

modify_ldt: Invalid argument

modify_ldt: Invalid argument

modify_ldt: Invalid argument

modify_ldt: Invalid argument

modify_ldt: Invalid argument

err:seh:raise_exception Exception frame is not in stack limits => unable to dispatch exception.

I tried updating wine, but that did nothing. So might as well just wipe the install and start again. So how do I be sure I don't loose data?