http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15157
--- Comment #22 from Alexander Dorofeyev alexd4@inbox.lv 2009-01-17 14:12:26 --- Well the conclusion then is that there probably was/is no Wine bug with the game. Kae Verens's backtrace appears to be the same crash due to lack of Indeo codec. Not sure about the very first reporter - it seems to be something different, but looks a bit like the problem when running THIEF.exe from outside the game install directory. Unfortunately, he isn't following up on this and his last report was quite a while ago.
To Michael G: unless you can retest this and provide logs to confirm this is not the codec thingy or some other known problem like starting exe from outside the game directory, this will have to be closed as INVALID or ABANDONED. The game seems to run well currently.
To Christos Sotiriou: sound works for me in 1.1.12 FWIW. Problems I previously noticed were my own screw-up: I was actually using git wine and that was IIRC something in between 1.1.12 and 1.1.13. Now sounds seem to work in git trunk as well, must have been some work in between those releases that temporarily broke the sound. So for you it could indeed be some pulseaudio issues, I think.