Hi Alexander,
Good to see you back in GSoc. I can't comment on IE / control panel as I don't know much about it but I will comment to another small part.
As for my own project ideas, I think it would have been interesting to implement IPX over TCP in winsock, since most of the games that use IPX require root access for it to work. This feature could perhaps be enabled in winecfg or the Control Panel. I don't have any experience with networkking, though, so I'm concerned that this might be a bit amibitous.
It should be possible to implement IPX over TCP but when you do this, the other side also needs to wrap IPX in a TCP packet. (there are various user space tools I believe which can do this). IPX can be used without root permissions if you use posix file capabilities to enable raw sockets on wineserver. I experimented with this a long time ago and I wasn't able to get it working at that time but this should somehow work.
Roderick