I haven't had any issues aside from the long load after patches. Several times now, I have used the Crosstie to very successful results. The one tweak I do make sure is done, is to have wine take over the desktop and use a virtual workspace of 1920x1080 so I can ALT=TAB from STO/CO/NW to another app (like Teamspeak or Mumble). Without that things tend to get janky.
Since you are saying that you are getting different results from each install, I would have to wonder if you have some sort of OS corruption. I have gotten the entire Cryptic suite of games working in MacOS X 10.6.8 and on several Fedora, RHEL, and OpenSUSE installs within the last few weeks. No issues. The only unclean setup is my iMac, which I would love to just drop Linux on anyhow, but the radeon video issues are starting to get to me ...