I've seen similar behavior when running Wine with a non‑root user inside Alpine‑based images. A few things helped resolve or work around the issue:

Preinitialize the Wine prefix as root

Run winecfg during the build (as root) so the prefix is properly set up. Then change ownership of the Wine prefix folder for your non‑root user. For example:

RUN winecfg && chown -R app:app /home/app/.demo

Switch from Alpine to a glibc‑based image Wine tends to behave more reliably on glibc‑based distributions. Consider using python:3.12‑slim (Debian‑based) instead of the Alpine image.

Check SELinux and permissions on RHEL9, on some systems SELinux can interfere with non‑root operations. Look for any SELinux denials in the logs and adjust policies as needed.

Try these steps as a starting point. In our experience, switching to a Debian‑based image or pre‑initializing the Wine prefix as root (and then fixing permissions) resolved the host freezing issue without running the container as root.