http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12964
--- Comment #124 from Brian bkohler36@gmail.com --- Actually, I'm very sorry, I had completely forgot I didn't get all the required x86 development headers when compiling WINE and thus support for some things was missing, among them sound. I tested the game on a binary distribution of 1.7.13 and sound worked just fine.
I took the chance to redo my experiments on counting the calls to the function where I get crashes under nouveau and to my surprise up to the ship selection screen I get less than 100 calls(73 IIRC). Could it be that well before the 331st call the function is failing and the program has to try it again and again until it gets a positive result or a page fault? I'll take a look at the traces I have later and see if I can find something unusual.
About how it turns out both ATI and Nvidia open source drivers solve the bug, looking at the Linux Graphics Stack diagram on wikipedia, it seems both open source drivers use a fair bit of libraries in common upwards from the hardware-specific stuff(whereas proprietary drivers seem to tend to use prorprietary implementations). That doesn't explain much about the problem, but makes the solution look a bit less unlikely, doesn't it?