[Wine] Wine 0.9.57 - Cannot Install/Use Office 2000 Premium

[ChasF]

I have been trying to install and use Office 2000 and I still cannot get the applications to work.

System environment
- OpenSUSE 10.3 x86_64 on a dual processor Opteron machine.
- KDE version 3.5.9.67.2
- Wine version 0.9.57-18.1 i586
- Winecfg "Windows Version": Windows 2000.
- Other 32bit applications run fine.
- Office 2000 Premium Upgrade version.

Background information
- I have 12 years of experience with Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP and I have a very good knowledge of the Windows runtime environment. (I often fix my friends' computers.)
- The Office 2000 disk installs perfectly on this machine under Windows 2000 SP4 (I loaded Windows about a month ago).

Problems
1. The installer ignores the selected functions: i.e. bug 6719 is still open/valid.
2. Whenever I start any of the applications, I am asked to enter the Product Key every few seconds.
3. There isn't a clear list of the steps that must be taken to install Office 2000 successfully. [See (g) below.]
4. There is a problem with the way that Wine processes the registry. Windows' file names are not case-sensitive, but they are treated as case sensitive during registry processing. So you get errors about a file being missing even though it's there. This, of course, means that you run into all sorts of problems with Windows patches and you may need to create many  versions of every file (e.g. ole32.dll, OLE32.DLL, Ole32.dll, Ole32.DLL, etc.). [I can provide a more detailed explanation of this if required.]

More Details
(a) I've experimented quite a lot and I've re-installed Wine several times to try to solve the problems. (I made sure that I deleted the .wine directory before the new installation in order to force a clean installation.)
(b) All steps were carried out using my user (not root), and I ran winecfg before starting the installation.
(c) There are several "winetricks" steps that must be run before the installation is started:
- allfonts [If you don't do this, you get errors later on]
- jet40 [For Access and Excel]
- mdac25 [For Access and Excel]
- mfc40 [This contains dll's in the registry which are not in the Wine package]
- tahoma
- vcrun6 [For Access and Excel]
- wsh56 [needed because of Problem 1]
(d) I also installed msi2 since this is a Microsoft prerequisite for some applications.
(e) I've checked the registry and the Office Product key is in there (see HKCR\Licenses\). The HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S...\Products\ entries are there as well.
(f) The Product Key problem (Problem 1) may well be linked to the "Libraries" settings in winecfg. The current values are:
- odbc32 (native)
- odbccp32 (native, builtin)
- ole32 (builtin)
- riched20 (native, builtin)
- riched32 (native, builtin)
I ran winetricks for riched20 and this did seem to make Access a little more stable. (You can start it now, but as soon as you try to do very much you get the Product Key request. Before the fix, the Product Key request appeared immediately.)
(g) From the tests I've been doing (and the error messages shown in the Konsole window), I think that the Product Key problem may well be caused by one or more missing/incompatible dll's or programs.
(h) I've repaired the Office installation several times and I've implemented the files which are listed in the registry but were not installed.[/b]