http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58647
--- Comment #12 from Rafał Mużyło galtgendo@o2.pl --- OK, now for the later part.
It's often hard to strike a correct balance between clean prefix and external additions that *feel* necessary for a program to work correctly.
Quite obviously, some of them actually aren't, but sometimes figuring out which are which is quite tedious. Sometimes dropping a nuke on the problem (like you did in your initial prefix) works well (well, in the context of the particular app), sometimes it just doesn't.
Here, this mostly harmless line is likely the problem:
0150:fixme:wmp:activate_inplace Windowless activation not supported
I'm not sure what is the current state of support for wmp in vanilla wine, but in the context of this game this seems to be problem. It's difficult to tell whether or not it has a decent solution.