http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10277
--- Comment #36 from Vincent Povirk madewokherd@gmail.com 2008-11-27 10:23:30 --- I'm not actively working on this bug right now. The patch I attached is not a good solution to this problem. It's an abuse of the TryExec field, and it doesn't work very well at all.
Now that wineshelllink is dead (good job killing it btw :), I am thinking about trying to add an X-Wine-LnkFile field to Wine-generated .desktop files and some sort of command to remove dead links. I don't have a clean path to a real fix, and there's no telling when I'll get to doing even that much.
I won't mind if you take this over, especially if you have a plan that might work.