https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45753
--- Comment #4 from Dmitry Timoshkov dmitry@baikal.ru --- (In reply to Rosanne DiMesio from comment #3)
However, I do want to point out that many apps have limited numbers of activations, and expecting people to use them up because of arbitrary changes to the wineprefix seems unreasonable.
The changes are not arbitrary, they fix a real bug, and they also bring the Wine prefix environment more closely to Windows 7 and newer variants, which is currently the default reported Wine version.
I guess that the same incompatible change would happen during the Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade.