http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35147
--- Comment #9 from Rosanne DiMesio dimesio@earthlink.net --- (In reply to comment #8)
Hi, I've installed wine-1.6.1, and it's able to start the game preloader. I have yet to be able to try with 1.7.9. I'll let you know if it works for me on 1.7.9
The Ubuntu 1.7.x and 1.6.x packages are built by different people. The former include the winepulse driver and other unsupported patches to dsound while AFAIK the latter do not. That could be the reason for the difference, and if it is, this bug is invalid. To test that theory, you would have to build 1.7.9 yourself.
FWIW, I can't reproduce this with the Steam demo. No native dlls installed, but I did have to disable winegstreamer to work around bug 30557 (that's another thing you might try, if you haven't already).