Spotify under wine

[Lisi]

The sound in Wine comes and goes.  Spotify is mission critical (where Amarok 
could be substituted for by something else).

I am running phonon and ALSA.

I have: 
reconfigured Wine
redownloaded Spotify
reinstalled Wine, followed by a reconfiguration
purged, installed and reconfigured wine (in that order!)

Other applications have sound and a system sound check is successful.  Just 
Wine has not.  I have read that Spotify runs well under Wine, so obviously I 
am doing something wrong, but what?

I posted about this yesterday on the Wine users list, but replies are scanty: 
1 that advises me to do something that I have already done- mea culpa for not 
giving enough information, but no help. It is a weekend so traffic slows to a 
crawl, and I am now under great time pressure.  Moreover, 5 solutions would 
not be a waste of time - it would give me 5 more things to try with, and one 
of them might work even for me.

Lisi