First of all, let me say this is not a new problem. I've had this problem over the last year of Wizard101 play, but it's not so irritating as to cause me to give up using CrossOver for Wizard101. The machine actively runs Mac OS X 24/7.
The problem seems to be related to heavier network activity. When there are more people in the same area as myself, the game will glitch regularly. I can tell if one person entered the same area as me just by the game freeze-ups. So you might say... well, sure there is more going on in the game and it's working harder to keep up. Yes, very true. I can reboot my Mac Pro into BootCamp Windows and I see no such freeze-ups. My guess is this has something to do with Wine blocking when there's network activity.
So is my machine under a heavy load? No. While the game is running, the system is about 85% idle, with only periodic higher peaks. This is a Mac Pro 2x3GHz quad-core xeon with 32GB of memory. With 8 cores, this machine is hardly impacted even with many other things running on the machine. In any case, it's not a matter of system load. Using CrossOver 11.2, Mac OS X 10.6.8. The game is as smooth as silk until someone enters the room, resulting in some periodic choppy game play. Again, this isn't BAD, but it's particularly noticeable and quite irritating.
Thanks,
Tom