Hi,
Thanks to everyone who's helped on this one.
Just to let you know this turned out to be end-user silliness by me.
Vincent Béron pointed me in the direction of checking installed glibc & RH kernel versions etc. It turns out that I had (twice!) downloaded the completely wrong RPMs.
Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
=== SUMMARY OF TIPS for wine-users list ===
On my RH8 box I can check exactly what RPMs were installed (as is commonly the case with RH Linux and maybe others using RPMs) by either checking the nightly log of this information: -
grep wine /var/log/rpmpkgs
...or by inspecting the current state of my machine (slower but more up-to-date) as follows: -
rpm -qa --qf '%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}.rpm\n' | grep wine
Of course, these approaches work for checking glibc and other packages too, or use egrep 'wine|glibc' for searching multiples, and so on.
Hope this helps.