Offhand, I don't know then, sorry. There's only so many things it can be, something is interfering with wine talking to the outside world. To me, that's the firewall. I don't use "uncomplicated fire wall", but it does seem like that's how you disable it, yeah. I'm not a big fan of simplified approaches to system services mostly because it obfuscates things from you to keep it simple. To me, on Linux, there's an init service running the firewall. I disable it, either by command line or through a services gui. I don't know how this sfw works, exactly, if it's the actual firewall or simply a front end to a standard firewall.
Can you actually use newsbin as a trial? I that works, that shows at least one port working.
DT
[EDIT] a little further research shows that there are issues with that release of Ubuntu(it's pretty bleeding edge) and SSL. Now, Quade pointed out correctly that Newsbin comes with it's own SSL library, so in theory that shouldn't be affected, but FWIW. I still think, though, the firewall is involved somehow.
http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/25 ... with-wine/https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/965371