Crossover works but wine crashes. Why?

[Jeff Melville]

I got tired of the
Unhandled Exception (thread 0009)

Error when starting excel with various builds/versions of wine, so I 
installed the Crossover Office demo today.

It worked on the first try, but I still cannot get the regular version 
of wine to load excel.

Since these are essentially the same code, what is being done 
differently that causes cxoffice to work but wine to crash?

One thing I noticed is that there are no wine-pthread instances present 
when cxoffice is running, just wineloader. Please help me figure out 
what is going on and how to remedy. Thanks!