http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11112
--- Comment #9 from Bernhard Rosenkraenzer bero@arklinux.org 2008-01-10 11:35:57 --- The intent of the original patch is to allow a setup where several users, let's call them "mom" and "dad", can share their Windoze applications without using the same account. Assuming the users are non-technical, it is safe to assume that they won't know how to copy registries around every time they install a new application, and it's also safe to assume that they won't be using the computer at the same time (at least not with different accounts) -- this is a pretty common situation and IMO should be addressed in some way.
Of course it also opens the possibility to mess up by running wine something.exe and sudo wine something.exe simultaneously - maybe the best way to stop that is creating a lock file in the config directory that is writable by the user only, and if it's there and owned by another user, abort with an error message saying "dad is currently using wine, please wait until he is done or create a separate wineprefix using wineprefixcreate"?