Stanron - Wine works ok for many programs, but not for everything. I have run some things under it without problems. There is a status list on the Wine site with reports of what runs under various versions, but it's not always up to date. Usually it's suck it and see.

But I've now installed a virtual XP machine (ca £20 for an oem xp/pro disk off ebay or amazon, can't remember which) running under VirtualBox and I'd probably install windows programs under that now if I needed them. With integrated windows, a program running under the virtual machine can have it's windows on your desktop, looking as if they're actually running on your machine directly (ie they don't have to be inside the virtual xp window). There are other virtualization options available under Linux, but for me xp seemed to be faster running under VirtualBox than under more direct virtualizations. (VirtualBox is also probably the simplest to set up). My virtual xp runs faster than the non-virtual version on my old hardware! (You can also virtualize your live machine if you want - there are several tutorials out there if you want to transfer your entire windows machine to a virtual one. I wasn't interested in that and the oem xp/pro disk was cheap enough. I know xp's out of support now, but it's not really an issue for what I want to do)

Mick