http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20969
--- Comment #14 from Jukka Tastula poltsy@gmail.com 2010-09-28 05:08:54 CDT --- I didn't run winecfg at all, just pointed WINEPREFIX to somewhere new and ran the launcher. Now retesting I find that having it inside the prefix makes no difference (which was the original setup anyway). Removing Z: doesn't change anything, except that it has to be inside the prefix of course.
The game was originally installed from cds and dvd with wine on ext4 and I tried ext3 in ubuntu and fedora 13. Also the net installed cataclysm beta launcher has the same issue.
The launcher seems to be rather self-contained as you can just copy wow.exe and launcher.exe to any directory anywhere without ever installing the game and it will run as it should (on wine 1.1.28 and windows xp/7 anyway). It doesn't seem to depend on any magic registry keys created during installation or any other files in the game itself.