How to repair Wine

I was using Wine successfully to install Windows-based programs. One day, it stopped working. When I try to open an exe file with Wine, nothing happens.

I tried to resolve the problem by re-installing Wine, first purge, then, install it again. But no success.

How can I diagnose Wine or re-install it to make it work?

3 Answers

Backup your Wine folder and remove the original one.

mv ~/.wine ~/.wine.bak
rm -r ~/.wine

Then, purge and reinstall -

sudo apt-get purge wine
sudo apt-get install wine

How can I diagnose Wine

If you haven't already, try running the program from terminal (wine [path/to/]program), not via shortcuts. You may see some unrelated messages that the program or Wine would give even during normal operation, but some may actually give you a hint at what's wrong.

At some point you might want to backup and reinstall like in Rohith's answer, but you also want to restore data or settings of your old Wine environment, which may lead to comparing the backup with the new environment and do trial-and-error-style troubleshooting.

Disable wine config.

Rename /home/<your-user-name>/.wine to .wine-old.

You don't need to purge it, if you have not executed wine with root privileges.

Diagnose wine.

In terminal type:

wine /path/to/your/windows-app.exe