Glad to hear that you have sorted out the problem with a new version of the application. I think the general rule is that if wine doesn't provide some component (such as mfc and vc++ 80), using winetricks to install the additional components is preferred over installing application's bundled additional installers.
OK. As mentioned before, I explicitly looked into Winetricks, and for that particular VC++ runtime library version it does an ordinary install and nothing else.
As for debugging problems with applications, the most useful and concise advice I have read is actual this - I looked for it earlier but couldn't find it because the web page has a strange name :-): http://www.winehq.org/site/developer-cheatsheet
Aah. Indeed, this helps. A minor things: I can read
Investigate the RelayInclude and RelayExclude string values in [HKCU\Software\Wine\Debug] if you're being overwhelmed by certain functions. [...]
I suppose this is a registry entry, right? (I normally don't use Windows, so I'm not too acquainted with that.) Perhaps one or two sentences can be added to mention this, together with an explanation which program should be used to change those settings.
Werner