At a guess he didn't find the existing bug because it was filed against libwine-unstable rather than wine-unstable - and the cloned bug (540646) was renamed with a title that didn't make it apparent that it was related to this. In any case the version of libc6-i386 currently in unstable (2.9-24) appears to fix this problem, only leaving #541201 as an annoyance when starting up a program via wine.