Thanks Occam, your incites are much appreciated.
I've used lots of distros and there seems little difference from my point of view. I have used many versions of Wine as well, and I don't think I actually had many problems even when the version was less than 1.0, although things did improve with higher version numbers, becoming pretty much flawless as the version hit about 1.5 and higher.
I use wineg++ to compile the code that involves Wine.
As far as the IPC we use is concerned, I won't say too much about that publicly, other than that I've used everything under the sun (almost). But I can share one thing I've learned with heavy trading data feeds (not specific to NxCore): if things are getting choked, it often pays to increase cache/buffer sizes a bit more than the default, or even layer in extra buffers yourself for that purpose.