It's not so benign. Apps fail to start because of this. The workaround is to run wineprefixcreate by hand; it still fails, but then when you run wine all is well.
Here's an example of the symptom. In this case I was trying to install the photoshop 7 trial without an existing .wine directory:
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000200 at address 0xb7f28bad (thread 0009), starting debugger... wine: wineprefixcreate failed while creating '/home/dank/.wine'. dank@lappy:~/installers/adobe$ wineserver: could not save registry branch to /home/dank/.wine-AGXTqe/system.reg : No such file or directory wineserver: could not save registry branch to /home/dank/.wine-AGXTqe/userdef.reg : No such file or directory wineserver: could not save registry branch to /home/dank/.wine-AGXTqe/user.reg : No such file or directory