Problems installing steam, glitchy and windows won't show up

I downloaded wine, installed steam and ran it. Here's what happened:

• Steam seemed to work fine I downloaded and installed Counter Strike 1.6 and install it, it launched fine twice

• Steam chat doesn't display any text when messaging friends

• I closed steam and reopened it and it didn't display any windows, the only way I could see them was thumbnails in alt-tab

So, I just removed steam and I'm gonna try reinstall it... why wouldn't it work? This is my first time installing something in wine and I don't know if I have to configure it in a special way..

Help please

EDIT: I have both winXP and vista computers available if I need system files of some sort

Steam is a tad bit buggy when you're running it through Wine. Messaging friends is useless as you've said, it doesn't display any text for whatever reason.

Also, I've found that you need to disable the in game community to have the games run properly, though I've really only tried Counter Strike Source, not 1.6.

I didn't have to transfer any files from Windows, but just a tip, you can transfer the .gcf file from the Windows drive to the same directory in your Wine C drive and Steam won't have to download the whole game.

For 1.6 it would be counter-strike.gcf located in /Program Files/Steam/steamapps

Most games have little things that don't work properly in Wine (if not big things :D)

So it's not necessarily something you've done wrong. As Muffinabus said, steam chat is very flawed, although I've managed to just about use it on occasion.

As for your missing window, could it just have gone off-screen? It happens sometimes, especially if you've got wobbly windows on.