http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33931
--- Comment #1 from Gediminas Jakutis gediminas@varciai.lt 2013-08-19 13:57:05 CDT --- This bug is also triggered if Wine has to access a directory which is symlinked to somewhere outside the "emulated volume/disk". Examples:
example #1: [wineprefix]/drive_c/windows/Fonts symlinked to /foo/bar/sharedfonts
example #2: Steam being installed under d:\steam, d: being mapped to /foo/bar/games and /foo/bar/games/steam is a symlink to ../../steamisreallyhere (which would be /foo/steamisreallyhere, and that is "outside" /foo/bar/games.)
example where it doesn't get triggered: [wineprefix]/drive_c/windows/fonts symlinked to [wineprefix]/drive_c/somedir works fine as it's within the same emulated c: drive
Unlike the previous way to trigger this bug, this one is fully reversible - removing the offending symlink or relinking it to somewhere "within the bounds" of an emulated drive makes the issue go away.
I suppose this means that "Local hard disk" setting flips off something deeper to trigger this bug instead of being the source of the problem itself.
The fact that those GetVolumePathNameW calls only appear when this bug is in action, I get the feeling Wine takes some different codepath somewhere which ends up being not-well-working. I'm going to try to dig it out where it happens and find what exactly goes wrong.
Observation #1: Let's say c:\some_dir_wine_accesses is symlink at /foo/bar/somedir, which is outside c: bounds. By default this would make /foo/bar/somedir accessible by two possible paths: c:\some_dir_wine_accesses and z:\foo\bar\somedir. But despite that, two possible paths is not the cause. As removing the default z: drive (which then leaves it with only one access path) doesn't change the behaviour at all.
Observation #2: It is triggered if Wine tries to access the symlinked directory no matter if it access any files inside it or not. A good example - symlinking the Fonts folder to an empty directory.
(The Fonts directory is very handy for triggering/testing this bug - it always gets accessed by Wine, yet contains nothing even remotely important [and is empty by default in the first place...])