[Wine] Looking for help with an old VB App

[Mezz]

In my crusade to convert a few work PCs to Linux (basic office, an adobe air app and VoIP software phones) I've crashed and burned on a ridiculously old legacy app.

Judging by the look of the software its probably based on VB5 or 6 at best (especially with how the installer works).  I have several problems with it that I'm hoping someone might give me some ideas with as frankly I'm out of them at the moment.

1. Installer has garbled fonts once it gets going (you can make out the words but its like someone reduced the size to 25% and you're left with 5 pixels per character).  This isn't a big issue but might help provide hints for later problems.

2.  When the app is loaded clicking on the File, Edit etc menus at the top cause it to freeze up the entire Linux GUI.  You can alt + tab to another program (I usually have system monitor open ready on the process tab) but although the mouse moves you get no response from clicks, you have to use keyboard shortcuts to kill it off.

This effectively means I can't configure the settings for the app.

3.  By copying a working setup from an existing XP machine I can get around problem 2 however the program uses an MS Access database on a windows share.  I can't seem to find a good way to get this to work.  The closest I got was mapping a drive and then pointing it to that.  However I get errors as obviously there is a difference between a drive and a windows share that it doesn't like (Can't access database, nothing useful as far as error messages go).

4.  The app communicates via windows sockets specified by IP + Port to the 'server' machine (ancient XP box with the server program on it connected to hardware via a serial cable).  I'm not sure how to get sockets to work as I just get "error communicating with socket".

I have tried setting wine up in a similar manner to installing VB6 but the program crashes if you override OLEAUT32.DLL and the rest of the suggestions make no difference.

I appreciate that this is quite a vague description but I'm pretty much a Wine newbie.  I have tried upgrading from wine 1 to the latest 1.1 with no change.  I also installed a bunch of wine tricks tweaks.  I have access to a fully fledged XP machine so can easily copy anything that might be necessary.

I am running a variant of Karmic however have had the same problem with vanilla 9.10 and Jaunty (9.04).

If anyone can give me a hint of where to start it would be greatly appreciated.  After all judging by how easy it was to get fully blown Windows games to work, a crappy old VB App can't be a big deal.

Thanks for your time.