https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39849
--- Comment #1 from Andrew Eikum aeikum@codeweavers.com --- Do you have the "Audio" driver setting set in your registry? If not, then we need to probe each type of audio driver to determine which is available. For winepulse, we try to load libpulse in order to contact the PA server.
If you really want to avoid this (why?), then you can set the Audio driver setting to "alsa", which will skip probing all of the available drivers. See http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys.