From Wine-Wiki

Wineprefixcreate is handled by running winecfg. In Bug 13113 A. Julliard: wrote May 2008- There's no need to run wineprefixcreate any more, it's deprecated. Just run wine and everything happens automatically [italics added]. L. Rayhen May 2008: It was for [a] manual update of a WINE prefix. Now it is automatic and therefore it isn't needed anymore. [..] for scripts [...] just use "wineboot" instead of "wineprefixcreate. Use WINEPREFIX to setup wine in a different folder other than .wine

V. Margolen commented: For [the] past several weeks whenever I run older Wine version it "updates" wine configuration with old settings. A. Julliard: when you go back to the new version you'll get the new settings again. If they don't get updated properly that should be fixed.

M. Jung [Feb 05] wineprefixcreate is executed only if the user calls wine without having a '.wine' directory in place at all. What this means is that there is no registry and no configuration at all at this time. [...] wineprefixcreate is meant to install a default configuration [...]. The configuration it installs is a good starting point to be tailored to your needs, though. It won't be touched by wineprefixcreate again, once it is generated.

Wine Packaging Documentation:If WINEPREFIX is not present, wine will generate a setup by itself by calling wineprefixcreate. This will load all default registry entries, and register dlls where necessary. A special "wine.inf" file is provided with the WINE sources and installed to /usr/share/wine/.

To create a new, clean wine fake windows system, instead of running wineprefixcreate you might consider using either winecfg or Wineboot.

Testing using a clean wine

L. Rayhen showed how you can test without losing your existing wine setup with all your favorite programs. [Oct 07 wine user]: to find out if any particular problem is reproducible with clean WINE it is good idea to create separate wine prefix directory like this:

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine.tmp wineprefixcreate

[installs a clean version of wine in the directory .wine.tmp] Then you can install your application where you think you found a regression as usually. For example:

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine.tmp wine setup.exe

You can export WINEPREFIX environment variable in order to not retype it with every WINE-related command. Using above simple instructions you will be able to test possible regressions in clean wine prefix directory without touching you main ~/.wine folder. And as I said above I see no point in reinstalling all your applications in clean wine prefix directory if you don't have problems with your current one. Of course you may miss regressions in overridden DLLs (if you really want to catch all possible regressions make sure that you are using only builtin DLLs).

• WINEPREFIX

Updating Wine

When your wine is updated by your distribution, it continues to use your existing wine directory. This means at this stage (pre wine version 1.0) when your wine is upgraded, your install of wine is still missing the many of the updates that the developers have added to the registry. After recieving an update for wine, you can (with caution) update an existing install of wine by typing on the command line or in a terminal window

wineprefixcreate

However, at this stage it is not guaranteed to not break your anything. Some make a copy of the old wine folder before typing wineprefixcreate. If things run worse they then have the option of reverting.

forum comments

A User noted: [May 06] A directory that looks like a .wine directory is created, but the directory name is suffixed with a dash and a seemingly random string. For example: .wine-d7DD26

D. Skorka: That's a temporary directory that will be renamed to .wine when wineprefixcreate is done wine archive

wine-user Apr 06: When I do a wineprefixcreate, it creates all my "drives" in the dosdevices directory.