I slogged through writing a shell script that works around all the problems I ran into which installing a VB app that uses MS SQL. Have a look, it's at: http://kegel.com/wine/initvbapp.sh.txt Oh, the pain, the pain! It had to download and install the MDAC runtime download and install the VB runtime download and build cabextract and unshield for the next step, download and manually unpack the ntwdblib.dll driver from MS SQL 7, work around Wine bug http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3636, and work around a bug in the VB packaging wizard http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299645, and *then* run the app's installer. I haven't verified that the app runs once installed; I'm just so happy to have the installer complete with no errors finally.
This is probably similar to what winetools does, but I haven't looked at winetools to see how much overlap there is. I certainly prefer a simple shell script like this to a menu-driven opaque program, at least when trying to understand root causes of problems.
Hopefully this will help somebody else who's trying to get VB apps to install.