http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14765
--- Comment #8 from Simetrical Simetrical+wine@gmail.com 2008-08-21 12:34:40 --- I guess that's not so surprising, since it starts about a third of the time for me, too (with the various updates and packages I installed since my first comment here, anyway). It's perfectly playable, I just need to go through an ornate startup procedure -- which includes restarting multiple times until the error message about the exception goes away.
I at least would be interested in seeing your log, since we have pretty similar setups.