Unable to start Excel97

[Didier B. Ramilison]

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