good morning, i am new to wine and i am confronted to a problem trying to run excel 97. i installed wine-20030508 from source and everything went smoothly. after configuring wine, i installed Excel 97 and here too everything went smoothly, or i think it so. i never managed to start excel though, as each time a message tells me "impossible to access to 'MSCREATE.DIR'. the file is in read only state, or you are trying to access a directory with read only access. another possibility is that the server is not responding". i then gave rw access to the c directory which is in my home directory. i do have no windows partition on my drive. this though does not solve the problem as the next message i get when starting excel is "the format of MSCREATE.DIR is not valid" can anybody give a help? i am on the problem since the beginning of the week until i finally made the decision to check and to write this mail to the forum. thanks didier