Grr. Maybe I should go look at last year's ttydrv to see how to do it properly :-)
most of the curses loading is protected by ifdef:s (btw curses inclusion is 2 years and 8 months old... perhaps you didn't have the curse-devel package installed by then) did you try recompiling wine with --without-curses option in configure ?
Actually, what I'd like to see is a way to specify the driver to use on the wine commandline. It's bogus to have to have a separate .wine directory to do that...
it would be a better fix, as Alexandre noted, to let true CUI apps run without user/gdi support, rather than tweaking every possible bit
A+