Recently Wine was refusing to start any Windows program. When I dropped down to a (gnome-)terminal and tried to launch executables the “manual” way (by typing wine [executable name]), an error message similar to this was presented:

fixme:ntdll:NtQuerySystemInformation info_class SYSTEM_PROCESSOR_PERFORMANCE_INFORMATION
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk "RPCRT4.dll" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for
L"..." failed, status c0000005 

A bit of searching pointed me to the right direction. It seems that I’ve installed the “official” dll from Microsoft (possibly when trying to get an other app running), which wasn’t playing nicely with the emulated environment. The solution which worked for me was to go back to the emulated one, by running winecfg, going to the “Libraries” tab and for rpcrt4 selecting “Builtin then Native” instead of “Native then builtin”.

Hope this helps if you have similar problems (during search I’ve found that you can get the same error with other DLL’s, MSVCRT80.DLL for example, and this solution may apply to those situations also).