https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45320
--- Comment #4 from Jason Edmeades us@edmeades.me.uk --- My gut feeling is that CreateProcess itself should be setting the =C: type environment variable, but nothing has ever cared that it doesnt so its not worth implementing. In cmd we needed a way to remember the current directory for any other drive letter you visited, so using the same mechanism made sense, hence setting it explicitly at cmd start.
Since Python doesnt like it, I guess you need to look at how Python retrieves and enumerates its copy of the environment to see which API potentially masks these out (assuming this works on windows). Alternatively is the env block passed into a launched process excluding these somehow?