msnbc news alert installer: "Unable to start browser"

[Dan Kegel]

While doing research for my site on the Microsoft
antitrust trial ( http://www.kegel.com/remedy/ ), I
came across a nasty little EULA for a product called
MSNBC News Alert.  The EULA is at
http://www.msnbc.com/tools/newsalert/naeula.asp
and says

> MSNBC Interactive grants you the right to install and use
> copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT on your computers running validly
> licensed copies of the operating system for which the SOFTWARE
> PRODUCT was designed [e.g., Microsoft Windows(r) 95; Microsoft
> Windows NT(r), Microsoft Windows 3.x, Macintosh, etc.].

It'd be nice to know how close Wine is to being able to 
(a) install and (b) run this on a fake windows installation,
as this may have some bearing on whether Microsoft is
damaging anybody with this exclusionary EULA.
(Besides, how could I resist?  That EULA practically begs to be disobeyed!)

So I downloaded it from
http://www.msnbc.com/tools/newstools/d/news_alert.asp
and ran it, but it failed with the dialog box
  "News Alert and Windows were unable to start your
   default browser to access the following URL..."

Can anyone have a look at what's wrong (presumably Wine 
doesn't implement browser control, or I don't have a browser
registered?)

I'm running Wine release 20010731 (my, that's old!)
The output of wine -debugmsg +all is at
http://www.kegel.com/wine/newsalert/log.bz2
and is 328KB compressed (200 MB expanded!)
I can't see anything obvious, but then I'm out of practice.
(You probably just want to download the executable and
try it yourself.)

Thanks,
Dan Kegel