All, The system is FC2 with wine 20050211 installed. The win environment is a native win98 partition. A boot of the native partition runs excel 97 w/o issue. Attempts to run excel under wine result in the excel splash screen being locked in the forground window and no access to exel. The only way out is to kill all wine pids. As per the notes dcom98.exe is successfully installed. (as a note there is no mscreate.dir error. ) Does anyone know the dll associated with the splash screen? It may be necessary to use native dlls to work around this. This error is recurring. It was persistant a year or so back and then seemed to work in late 2004. However it is back in the Jan and Feb 05 wine releases. Is this a current wine error or is there a config or install that is missing? Thanks, Dan