http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5503
--- Comment #38 from Kirill K. Smirnov lich@math.spbu.ru 2007-12-10 09:37:00 --- Yes, this is a really problem.
Currently there are five main issues with winhelp:
1) Very slow processing. Now winhelp reads entire file into memory and decompresses all topics in the file. It takes a lot of time with large files, e.g. win32.hlp by Borland - I could not wait until it finishes on Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz 1Gb RAM.
2) Lack of index and contents. These most important features are missing.
3) Now winhelp uses its own renderer instead of richedit. Since help files are compiled from rtf, it is naturally to use riched20 library to display help. Unfortunately, riched20 is not complete. (Also usage of riched20 allows to select and copy text).
4) Lots of undocumented features to support. The most complete documentation of this format i use (by Manfred Winterhoff at http://www.geocities.com/mwinterhoff) is still incomplete and misleading in some places (e.g. TOPICPOS).
5) winhelp is very obsolete help format to support. Even Vista itself does not support .hlp files. IMO very few people really need this (i may be wrong).
I'm going to fix some of these bugs (maybe index/contents) in the near future.