Interesting question I am stuck on...

So, people are aware that there are tech questions to try to increase seed viability, I'm sure. I want to try some to try to help some of the wild plant species I've had the hardest time growing & found a method that seems to work, for the most part- at least, on seed that isn't particularly old. I opted to not use hydrogen peroxide & just gave them a warm sugar water bath for an hour or so before transferring them to paper towels to dry.

The question I have is, I prefer sowing in winter, as this keeps most animals from eating the seed. If I do this, should I expect a lot of this seed to attempt to sprout during winter & die, get dehydrated back to square 1 again before its time for them to grow by the conditions or will it be fine?

I hope you do some tests and report back. Very interesting question.

I think as long as the seeds are dried back out fairly quickly after their bath they should be fine over winter. You might find that they don't keep viability quite so long since the sugar bath has presumably damaged the skin of the seed allowing germination to start more easily. I think that is what the acid baths usually do - etch the seed coats allowing moisture and air in.
The possibilities of improving germination using something as accessible and benign as sugar is intriguing. Can you share more? I grow quite  afew trees from seed and often have issues with seeds rotting before germination or just sitting stubbornly in the pots!

So far as I am aware, the idea is rehydrating the seed with a little bit of extra energy from the sugar.

Several of the videos I was watching were recommending using a hydrogen peroxide bath, but one guy followed the peroxide bath with a sugar bath.

I tried with just the sugar bath on some wild oats. While it eventually worked, the oats trapped a lot of air & a lot of them didn't want to sink, so after the first few volunteers actually did, I started randomly pressing a few against the bottom to remove air bubbles until the vast majority of them eventually all did. A lot of the seed even turned from brown to green. I put them in two areas- one was a wet area in my woods, the other was an area on the edge of a local park that dried out after they removed a dam a quarter of a mile down the river.

The idea is trying to cause the seed to revert to a state similar to them being fresh on the plant they came from. I'd heard some people saying some species have the best seed viability at that stage & wanted to try this on several species where I just had 0 luck growing- mostly wildflowers, but also a handful of other species.