http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19182
--- Comment #55 from diafero@arcor.de 2012-08-02 09:47:16 CDT --- (In reply to comment #54)
But as a practical matter, working around this is trivial. Adding the override to .bashrc quashes it once and for all for that user, and the instructions for how to do that have been in the FAQ for over three years. I do not think adding a single line to a plain text file that does not even require sudo to edit is beyond the mental capacity of normal users.
Just that this does not work reliably, as was reported repeatedly in this thread: Even with the appropriate override being in place, sometimes mime-type associations are added.
I also think some people are greatly overstating the dire effects of not turning it off. My experience (on KDE) before I disabled it entirely was that mimetypes were added to the bottom of the list of associations, so the default for the system was not changed: LibreOffice still opened doc files when I clicked them, even though Wine had added a more than a dozen associations for Word (none of which worked, btw) to the list. If someone is seeing Wine's associations supersede existing defaults, IMO, they should file a bug for that, because I don't think that's the intended behavior.
Then you were lucky, for some reason. Before I managed to properly disable this behaviour (by patching my local wine installation to make winemenubuilder.exe exit immediately), wine would regularly change the default program associated with file associations like .txt or .inf. For local files, this was hardly noticeable as Dolphin noticed from the content that these were just text files. But if a content analysis was not possible (like, for example, when using the sftp:/ KIO slave to work on a foreign machine - which I do often), then only the filename is used to determine the file type, which means that every file ending .txt, .inf and some other endings would start notepad (which of course fails to get the file from the remote machine)... So yes, this kind of "integration" IS annoying.