Obviously, it seems that the required DDE server is not up and runnning. By enabling tracing on ddeml channel, i have found the queried server; it's Progman DDE server. On win2k (and other windows platforms i think), it seems that this server is launched when the system starts up or when a user logs in (i don't really know). Nevertheless, on wine this DDE server is not currently launched.
IIRC in Windows, it's implemented in explorer.exe (first flavor was implemented in progman.exe, hence the name)
Although, the progman application exists, is there a DDE server version already present in wine source tree ?
no
Other question, when a program requires the Progman DDE server , should wine launch it automatically ? The DDE server would shutdown itself when the last wine instance exits. Is it possible to associate this DDE server with wineserver ?
this has already been discussed. solution 1/ is to ensure that all apps Windows is normally running are also running (which means that explorer.exe would always run when wine starts up). solution 2/ is to have some kind of binding in wine where we could associate an application/service pair to an executable, and to launch this executable whenever we cannot find a DDE server with the same app/service pair
wineserver is definitively not the place where you want to implement this
A+