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Second, some programs run fine with wine, e. g. pcAnywhere. And some games do start up and show the title menu (like StarCraft or AOE2), but crash when selecting a game.
Third, as I said before, I've compiled wine from source on a Pentium II Debian box which doesn't even know what x86_64 is, and copied the installation directory /opt/wine-CVS... to my x86_64 box. But that didn't help. I also used the setarch-utility to make the Wine configure script see an i686-machine, and setting the -m32 flags for GCC by hand, but the effect was the same.
I also build Wine on an amd64 system (running gentoo/ amd64), no problems. But there's one thing I noticed a while ago: Wine continues to compile and install even if some of the DLLs won't compile. I had this a few times in the past, and ended up with a basically working Wine install that missed a few DLLs, mostly OpenGL-related stuff. Maybe something like that happens to you? Just check that all DLLs are built and in place, and make sure there were no errors during compile (like I said, with some DLLs, Wine just continues to build even though errors appear)...
Ciao, Willie