The fix posted on the nvidia forum works great for me. Somebody mentioned that this is simply wined3d, but that is not quite the case. For starters Gothic I and II are DirectX 7 games. wined3d only supports directx 8, 9 and 10 out of the box. Direct X 7 has some kind of conflict with the OpenGL libraries it needs to load.
Anyway - I suspect the fix is a compiled version of wined3d with directx 7 compatibility turned on even though it generally doesn't work. However in the case of Gothic I, it appears to work fine. While when I tried normal wined3d, I did not get a high level of success.

Unless you're one of those rare few who refuse to use any native Windows dlls inside of Wine, you shouldn't have any trouble running either Gothic 1 or 2. DX9 is backwards compatible with its more recent predecessors, and includes all of the code required to run all those older games. Just grabbing the recommended DX9 distribution off Winetricks, and doing a couple of .ini tweaks after you install the games should be all you need to do to get them up and running.
In fact, I found Gothic 1 & 2 to be about the easiest games to get running in Wine. And not just running, but running well. I have yet to experience a single hitch or random CTD while playing Gothic 2, and I played it well into the 4th chapter.

No CTD? wow you're doing better than on windows, sure it's pretty solid but definitely not crash free.

I think you are missing the point. WineD3D is an implementation of Wine's D3D libraries for Windows. Why does that matter? Because WineD3D uses OpenGL instead of DirectX at the lowest level. This means that in a case, such as this one, in which changes made to DirectX drivers by a particular company are causing problems, the use of WineD3D can perhaps alleviate the problem by relying upon the OpenGL ICD to do the legwork instead of native DirectX implementation.
In regards to my DirectX 7 comment, that has nothing to do with DirectX 9. It has everything to do with with WineD3D. WineD3D only implements DirectX 10, 9 and 8. But not 7 or earlier. Wine on Linux supports earlier versions of DirectX. The reason for this is simple and actually explained on the WineD3D site. It is because the OpenGL libraries in Windows rely upon the actual DirectX 7 libraries in Windows in order to load. This means that if WineD3D puts out a DirectX 7 library this is how things will load:
1) Load WineD3D Direct X 7 library
2) Load OpenGL library which WineD3D Direct X 7 library depends on
3) Load Direct X 7 library that OpenGL library depends on
See the problem here? Step 3 doesn't work right in most instances because the WineD3D libraries have replaced the actual DirectX 7 library. This that after step 3, step 2 runs again and it continues endlessly.
The Gothic games use DirectX 7. WineD3D doesn't ship with binaries that emulate DirectX 7 in an effort to avoid people getting nailed with this problem. The contribution Russian hackers have made is to provide a compiled build of the WineD3D libraries with DirectX 7 enabled. However I suspect that all of the people having issues with the game crashing either a) have a weird resolution selected that WineD3D cannot handle or b) are running into this issue as described above.
So keep in mind, Microsoft's backwards compatibility has nothing to do with the problem here. It is entirely an issue regarding Microsoft's OpenGL libraries relying upon a DirectX 7 library meaning that emulating DirectX 7 via OpenGL is less than plausible yet apparently works in some cases suggesting that the load order issue may be more driver dependent than Microsoft dependent.

Actually, I always found Gothic 2 to be the least...er...crashy of the series. So no, It doesn't run better for me in Wine than in WIndows, it runs just as well.
Jaylittle...
You seem to be a bit more versed with Wine than I am, but from what I gather, you seem to be talking about the reverse engineered Wine specific DX distribution. It might only make DX 8,9, and 10 calls, but the WInetricks distribution (which might be your aforementioned Russian Hacker contribution) looks to use Windows specific DX9 dlls as its base, and can thus, in theory, run everything DX9 is capable of handling. I guess you could say its a DX wrapper that uses proprietary code and thus has more open to it, unlike the Wine team implementation, which doesn't use any MS code.
Of course anything I say should be taken with a few grains of salt. For me, Wine was just one small part of my bigger Getting-To-Know-Linux experiment, so I'm not exactly the most educated person on the subject. I'm just going by my semi-informed impressions here.
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Nvidia has once again failed to deal with this in their latest drivers. However there is a (sort of) solution posted on World of Gothic:
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/showthread.php%3Ft%3D832583&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&usg=ALkJrhh1OQ_w02LFPqsrsL0K11rvlXF7Nw
What I did:
1/ Install the program(s) linked to above (they are in German but it is fairly commonsense to follow)
2/ Fiddled about with the resolution in the gothic.ini file (I changed it to 1280*800)
3/ Run Gothic twice (this is important apparently - the first run will crash and generate a bug report, the second run appears to work once this bug report already exists)
4/ Play

I cannot get either Gothics to run. If anybody could give me some hints how you got them working. I have tried on several different machines running ubuntu lucid.

Thank you for that link. I used the automatic installer and deleted the error report and now gothic works. Have to change the resolution in the gothic.ini file every time I have played and the game takes ages to load, but it works. Running Win 7 64 home premium with a 330m nvidia card.

Can someone pleas tell me what this fix is and how I can do it. Please make it simple to understand if possible.

They basically involve dumping some files into your Gothic/system and Gothic 2/system directory. Apparently (don't ask me I'm not an expert) they force the Gothic games to run through OpenGL rather than DirectX. The games run more slowly for me, and crash a bit more often, but they do work.
You can either try to run the German programs I linked to above which install the relevant files for you (with the downside that they are in German), or you can instead follow the steps on the Nvidia forum here: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=104636&view=findpost&p=1075892
EDIT: Update from Nvidia - looks like a fix will be on it's way fairly soon: see http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=104636&view=findpost&p=1087048

Thanks for the update. I wouldn't be so confident as they have been stating they'll fix it for ages, though they make it sound like it's already fixed.
Anyway I have been using that chimpy posted about, problem is the game crashes the moment I open a chest (gothic 1, haven't tried it on 2). Anyone know a fix?

wth! the new nforce driver 258.96 doesn't fix the problem, weird thing is, in the release note they no longer mention G2 having problem with vista 0r win-7 but it still doesn't work...!..this is so frustrating

The Nvidia dev says the issue will be fixed in the 260.x drivers. So probably a couple of months.

I was just about to post that!

Fill out the nvidia bug report
http://www.nvidia.com/object/driverqualityassurance.html
The more people who do it the more attention it will get.
Yes i know its supposed to get fixed in the 260# driver, but its also been a year since this was reported.