[Wine] Re: Wine broke my WindowsXP (can't login)

[helix]

> The easiest way to fix this is to simply remove your ~/.wine directory.
> Wine will create a new one that's set up properly.
> 
> Is this an option for you?

Did that. Errors are gone now. Thanks.


> It always looks in C:\windows\system32 etc.
> So the real question is, what is C: mapped to?
> 
> Wine uses "builtin" DLLs from some directory, which is commonly
> /usr/lib/wine (as determined by the packager for the Wine package you
> installed). It gets "native" DLLs typically from
> ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32, though this location can be changed in
> the registry.

So two paths. Before I wiped ~/.wine just now, C: (in Wine) was symlinked to my real C: partition (as ~/.wine/dosdevices/c). ~/.wine/drive_c was a directory on its own (on the Linux filesystem).


> What makes you think it is using some other locations?

The fact that it modified (supposedly, I don't know for sure) some files in /windows/C/windows/system32 -- which I thought Wine wasn't supposed to be looking in, but now know better.


> What "system files" are you referring to?

Well, basically those that are equivalent to Windows' own c:/windows/system32 files. To make myself more clear: where is the configuration option (if there is one) contained that tells Wine where to look for the usual *.dll files? Or is that more or less hardcoded? Judging by your answers, it's at least three places: /usr/lib/wine (site-wide), ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 (which is fine, since it's seperate from Windows), and/or ~/.wine/dosdevices/c/windows/system32/, which is bad, beacause of what I did.


> What do I have to do to stop users doing this. 

Maybe stating somewhere that files in ~/.wine/dosdevices/c etc. are modified by Wine -- I didn't expect that. I thought that these just set up some interfaces to have the windows directories available to Wine, but I didn't expect Wine to write there.


> Only solution to this is move wine to its own drive C and run a XP repair to remove the wine files from XP. Yep XP not working because Wine altered things to what they should be for wine.

Could you please give some hints which files those are? I checked some .dll's randomly and at least they seem not to be overwritten by the Wine ones... (they have different md5sums)