OK I figured out part of my problem. [In short, I have an windows application that spawn netscape with some command-line url]. As was suggested in this thread, I had to install a windows version of netscape (I only had the linux native version installed). The installation set up the registry and things work (well sort of, netscape complains about not being able to write to the tmp directory e: [which is /tmp]). The problem now is that I seem to be on the slippery slope; i.e., most of the plugins/helper applications are absent, so in order to see various file types I have to download more windows versions of things already on my system. None of this would be necessary if there was some way to get wine to first try a native program; e.g., before trying netscape.exe or whatever was in the registry, try netscape using a standard unix system call; only if this failed would wine look for a windows version. Alternately the order could be reversed (I'd be more than willing to remove the windows versions of netscape). The best solution, would be some sort of override capability be added to the config file, for example, similar to the way native vs windows .dll's are chosen. David