http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17776
--- Comment #10 from Richard Hendrikse een_meel_of_geen_meel@hotmail.com 2009-05-07 13:23:54 --- well, yeah, it's been around for a while. iirc, Civilization 4 has been failing to install AFTER copying 1 or more files, stating that it's access was denied, since as early as wine-0.9.40. This is why I haven't shown very much inclination towards performing a regression test...
And your expanation would also tell us why older games might succeed in installing; simply because their installer-versions didn't perform all these checks yet...