http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23875
--- Comment #26 from Thomas Spear Speeddymon@gmail.com 2011-11-27 05:00:28 CST --- That would be fine except that there is a bug already filed where you cannot see the Launcher options screen in wine (I don't have a windows install on this machine to be able to change it there.
Of course before I posted I checked google and found a way to disable it. Pain in the rear to have to do this but it appears the BackgroundDownloader.exe trick works here, as the files are being downloaded via that.
Side note to anyone else that is reading this: make sure to also check "Don't throttle background download.
I decided to cancel the download via BackgroundDownloader to see if Launcher will read the same setting; it does. So after you change the settings via BackgroundDownloader.exe, you can safely kill it and start up the Launcher again to complete the download.