Editing Installing WoW under Wine (section)

===Freeze on character selection screen===
* Wow version 5.4.2.17688 x64 Dec 12 2013
* wine version 1.7.12
* ubuntu 13.10 saucy
* worked fine on previous versions of wow and wine, but broke after a wine upgrade (it turns out this may have been a coincidence as other wine versions fail in the same way)
* 5 seconds after character selection screen, wow freezes and and a crash dump is generated
* wow-64.exe access violation, memory could not be read

*a full reinstall of wow did not solve the issue

This issue was resolved by renaming Wow-64.exe to Wow-64.exe.notused and launching just Wow.exe.
There is speculation (
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=28973&iTestingId=82373) that the problem is caused by Warden which searches for cheaters in memory locations that cause wow to crash under wine, and that 32-bit wow doesn't invoke that code.
Also on that link, it points out that there was an update, from 17665 to 17668 on Feb 10th, 2014.  The date at least corresponds to my experience, but I was broken at client version 17688, not 17668.

Wowpedia (http://wowpedia.org/Patch_5.4.2) says that client update 17688 was on Dec 18, 2014.