http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28042
--- Comment #7 from Andrew Eikum aeikum@codeweavers.com 2011-08-23 15:41:47 CDT --- The "Windows XP mode" thing doesn't really work like that. That setting just tweaks the reported OS version and a couple of behavior changes, like some shlwapi functions use ASCII instead of WCHAR for older Windows versions. The audio rewrite is a fundamental change. To keep the old behavior, we'd have to have _both_ codepaths laying around and maintained. Obviously that's not going to happen.
Unfortunately there's not a whole lot we can do to work around a broken application. We need to bring Wine up to match modern Windows behavior, and modern Windows behavior causes this application's bug to be exposed, as we can see by running it on post-XP Windows.