http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30632
--- Comment #5 from Alex cerebro.alexiel@gmail.com 2012-05-09 15:09:14 CDT --- The game is reported to work on AppDB so you seem to have something different than others. I asked you to test it with POL to see if it was a configuration issue and you said winetricks didn't help so the problem seems to be in vanilla wine.
From now, stop using winetricks or POL, and use a clean wine prefix.
I also asked you to test with an ISO file of the disc (created by dd) to determine if your CD drive was the root or not of the problem. Try as root but in the end, you should have a 6GB ISO file.
Then, you could do a md5sum of the ISO file and post it here, mine is alex@leon:~$ md5sum Games/TheSims3.iso e052f1a5d3a6e594e33ed3e76325426e Games/TheSims3.iso
You said you updated the game. Does the game without any update have the same issue ?
You can do (with a wine prefix already created) WINEDEBUG=+tid,relay wine path/to/TS3.exe 2>&1 | gzip > TS3.log.gz
If the log is not too big, you can upload here or somewhere else. If it's too big (say more than 10MB), you can also cut the file or keep only the latest 10MB which should contain the error.
Please note that +relay will log every single call (with small exceptions) hence a big log file. The more time (duration) wine runs with +relay, the bigger will be the log file so you can try shortening your recording (skipping intro, menus...).
Do $gunzip TS3.log.gz --stdout | grep MessageBox to see if the error message is in the log
And if you are brave enough, you can search the line where MessageBox appears and look at functions calls before this line.