http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13606
--- Comment #3 from Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net 2009-01-09 12:15:36 --- an strace of running wine cmd and then msys.bat shows that dozens of fonts are being loaded. virtually every single font in existence on my system - in both the wine windows subdirectory and /usr/share/fonts - is being loaded up.
X11 is loaded up and initialised: X11 locale files are read.
the whole strace is punctuated with significant registry reading (in DCE/RPC format).
libiconv.
X11 compose.
X11 keyboard.
if you cut out both those things alone - X11 and font loading - that would drastically reduce the amount of unnecessary CPU usage.