That would ultimately need a test to check if xaudio really initializes COM on that path (likely not indeed). Note that it is not only a matter of abstract correctness, initializing COM sets specific aparentment, and initialized state affects the app and can easily produce a bug. Where COM is initialized (and how, if it is, is that really multithreaded apt?) needs to be precise. Likely COM is initiliased elsewhere implicitly and the game depends of that, while finding what is supposed to do that exactly might be not exactly easy. Like it might be some random directshow component doing it, I found one not so long ago (2bcb70b3293c82b0a5bbbe5e56913e7ea99e2716, ba79f532310a5f6819b4807806af8d8ba0bb5a44) in the context of some other game but there may be more. -- https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/11717#note_149425