I posted this to comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine, but got no reply.
I'd been having problems with a windows application that want's to pass off a URL to a browser (netscape).
OK I figured out part of my problem. [In short, I have an windows application that spawn netscape with some command-line url]. As was suggested in this thread, I had to install a windows version of netscape (I only had the linux native version installed).
The installation set up the registry and things work (well sort of, netscape complains about not being able to write to the tmp directory e: [which is /tmp]).
The problem now is that I seem to be on the slippery slope; i.e., most of the plugins/helper applications are absent, so in order to see various file types I have to download more windows versions of things already on my system. None of this would be necessary if there was some way to get wine to first try a native program; e.g., before trying netscape.exe or whatever was in the registry, try netscape using a standard unix system call; only if this failed would wine look for a windows version. Alternately the order could be reversed (I'd be more than willing to remove the windows versions of netscape).
The best solution, would be some sort of override capability be added to the config file, for example, similar to the way native vs windows .dll's are chosen.
I'm willing to play around with this, but have no experience with the internals of wine. Can somebody point me to the right point of the source code? It'd probably be trivial (and less likely to mess up wine) to first try to fork off a linux command (e.g., by mapping the end of command to something lowercase and less the .exe or .com suffix) and if that failed resort to the windows command.
David
P.S., I don't subscribe to this list, so please CC me.