wine users - Mar 2008 - Wine 0.9.57 - Cannot Install/Use Office 2000 Premium

I have been trying to install and use Office 2000 and I still cannot get the
applications to work.

System environment
- OpenSUSE 10.3 x86_64 on a dual processor Opteron machine.
- KDE version 3.5.9.67.2
- Wine version 0.9.57-18.1 i586
- Winecfg "Windows Version": Windows 2000.
- Other 32bit applications run fine.
- Office 2000 Premium Upgrade version.

Background information
- I have 12 years of experience with Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP and I have a very
good knowledge of the Windows runtime environment. (I often fix my friends'
computers.)
- The Office 2000 disk installs perfectly on this machine under Windows 2000 SP4
(I loaded Windows about a month ago).

Problems
1. The installer ignores the selected functions: i.e. bug 6719 is still
open/valid.
2. Whenever I start any of the applications, I am asked to enter the Product Key
every few seconds.
3. There isn't a clear list of the steps that must be taken to install
Office 2000 successfully. [See (g) below.]
4. There is a problem with the way that Wine processes the registry.
Windows' file names are not case-sensitive, but they are treated as case
sensitive during registry processing. So you get errors about a file being
missing even though it's there. This, of course, means that you run into all
sorts of problems with Windows patches and you may need to create many  versions
of every file (e.g. ole32.dll, OLE32.DLL, Ole32.dll, Ole32.DLL, etc.). [I can
provide a more detailed explanation of this if required.]

More Details
(a) I've experimented quite a lot and I've re-installed Wine several
times to try to solve the problems. (I made sure that I deleted the .wine
directory before the new installation in order to force a clean installation.)
(b) All steps were carried out using my user (not root), and I ran winecfg
before starting the installation.
(c) There are several "winetricks" steps that must be run before the
installation is started:
- allfonts [If you don't do this, you get errors later on]
- jet40 [For Access and Excel]
- mdac25 [For Access and Excel]
- mfc40 [This contains dll's in the registry which are not in the Wine
package]
- tahoma
- vcrun6 [For Access and Excel]
- wsh56 [needed because of Problem 1]
(d) I also installed msi2 since this is a Microsoft prerequisite for some
applications.
(e) I've checked the registry and the Office Product key is in there (see
HKCR\Licenses\). The
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S...\Products\
entries are there as well.
(f) The Product Key problem (Problem 1) may well be linked to the
"Libraries" settings in winecfg. The current values are:
- odbc32 (native)
- odbccp32 (native, builtin)
- ole32 (builtin)
- riched20 (native, builtin)
- riched32 (native, builtin)
I ran winetricks for riched20 and this did seem to make Access a little more
stable. (You can start it now, but as soon as you try to do very much you get
the Product Key request. Before the fix, the Product Key request appeared
immediately.)
(g) From the tests I've been doing (and the error messages shown in the
Konsole window), I think that the Product Key problem may well be caused by one
or more missing/incompatible dll's or programs.
(h) I've repaired the Office installation several times and I've
implemented the files which are listed in the registry but were not
installed.[/b]

Nice recipe!  Can you add it to the appdb,
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=5124

Please do provide more details about the filename case problem.

I've carried on working on the problems but I still can't get any
application to run.

Further tests performed
(a) I have tested Access under Windows 2000 SP4 on the same machine (it can boot
OpenSUSE, FreeDOS and Windows 2000). Using some very good (and free!) monitoring
tools, I have screen-shots of the dll's which are loaded  at the point when
the error occurs on Linux.
(b) I have run winecfg and removed the drive letters which point to the Windows
2000 disk drives. (There is a Microsoft KB article about problems when more than
one copy of Office 2000 is found and you get exactly this problem - see
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321346/en-us.) This hasn't solved the
problem.
(c) Comctl32 and Comdlg32 must not have overrides set - the built-in versions
must  be used. If you use the Windows 2000 dll's you get more errors.
(d) The message err:rebar:REBAR_WindowProc unknown msg 2002 wp=00000000
lp=0033ebb8 always appears shortly before things go wrong. I have no idea what
this means.
(e) Following on from (d), the next steps for thread 0009 are:
- Load VBE6.DLL
- Load VBE6INTL.DLL
- 7 calls of fixme:ole:GetHGlobalFromILockBytes cbSize is xxxx
- fixme:storage:StorageImpl_Commit (0x150698 0): stub
- fixme:advapi:LookupAccountNameW (null) L"fuller" (nil) 0x33f4c4
(nil) 0x33f4c8 0x33f4bc - stub
- fixme:advapi:LookupAccountNameW (null) L"fuller" 0x72e02c8 0x33f4c4
0x72e0670 0x33f4c8 0x33f4bc - stub
- fixme:advapi:LookupAccountNameW (null) L"fuller" (nil) 0x33f46c
(nil) 0x33f470 0x33f464 - stub
- fixme:advapi:LookupAccountNameW (null) L"fuller" 0x72ffb68 0x33f46c
0x72fff10 0x33f470 0x33f464 - stub
This is where it's gone wrong because this/these registry calls should have
returned exactly one set of results..
(f) Following on from (e), a trace of WINWORD.EXE shows similar behaviour with
the registry reads.