BTW is there are some particular reason that you have to cc every single bug that you file to wine-devel mailing as well? I'm sorry, but quality of those bugs are not that good really to go directly to wine-devel list. With this particular bug you could at least try to find what is that program looks at to decide if you do have IE installed or not.
I certainly don't want wine-devel to turn into wine-users, but I think you are wrong to lump Dan's emails into that category.
Dan is a very capable developer; he may not be the most accomplished Wine hacker, but he is not without his chops. Note that many of the @ucla.edu patches that come to wine-devel are from his students.
Further, I think that Dan is triaging issues that are of fairly critical interest to Wine.
For example, IE dependence is a very hard problem for Wine; a lot of programs have that as an issue. I, for one, am grateful to Dan for running with the Windows version of Firefox, as it helps us be better ready to understand how to use Firefox to solve that problem.
Further, I happen to know that the Munich considered using Wine for their desktop migration, and they felt that Wine was 'awful'; so it is very interesting to me, personally, to explore why that might be.
Cheers,
Jeremy