http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10324
--- Comment #7 from Vitaliy Margolen vitaliy@kievinfo.com 2007-11-06 21:05:51 --- Anything GUI is not an option, because if you really logged in as root (not sudo, but 'su -l root') then DISPLAY var will not be set. Thus "disabling" any GUI not just for Wine but any other program. This also means no shell wrapper will help here either.
So a big fat warning that they should not do such a stupid thing generated from the wine loader (before they had a chance to destroy their WINEPREFIX). This also eliminates registry. So the only choice left is an environment variable or a command line switch.
Might be even an outright refusal to run as root if that env var is not set / option not given.