Thanks for the quick update. Calling winecfg with WINEARCH fails in a different way now:
$ export WINEPREFIX=`pwd`/foo
$ export WINEARCH=win32
$ winecfg
cat: /home/user/Desktop/sdafdsaf/foo/system.reg: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/winecfg: 29: exec: winecfg.exe: not found