http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15878
--- Comment #21 from Austin English austinenglish@gmail.com 2009-06-06 17:13:21 --- (In reply to comment #20)
But only in Wine is this a problem. This is not a problem for native Gimp on any platform. Please see comment 6 (http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15878#c6). Native gimp can execute from the Windows start menu or the Gnome/KDE/etc. menus in Linux. Installing Gimp with Wine generates entries in the wine menu subsection, but these are non-functional as Gimp run from here does not work. Surely this DLL resolution issue would also affect many other programs?
Launching it from the start menu on windows changes the working directory. Wine uses the PATH variable in the xdg-desktop spec to accomplish this. Make sure your desktop is following that spec.