http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27344
--- Comment #5 from Alex Bradbury asb@asbradbury.org 2011-05-31 15:35:37 CDT --- I tested and had the same experience as Dan Kegel. I'm also running Ubuntu 11.04 (though in x86-64), and with Nvidia binary drivers.
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GTX 260/PCI/SSE2 OpenGL version string: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 270.41.06
After saving settings once, I just get a blank screen but I can kill it as usual (winetricks glsl=disabled and d3dx9 does allow the game to work slowly).
It's possible that the 'configurator' sets one of the values in the game configuration file to something other than the default (i.e. what it is freshly after install). Investigating this might help pin down the source of this problem. Though for me the game didn't even launch until I'd opened the configurator once and then exited.