Hi all,
I played a bit more with wine the last days and stumbled over this sidenet site which also has some FAQ points:
http://sidenet.ddo.jp/winetips/config.html
I experienced the same "IE installer crashing" with wine >= 200412xx - I wonder why such a long known regression takes so long to get fixed again. Currently the common way seems to be to install an over half a year old wine just to update it after the IE installation ...
Aside from that, keep up your good work!
Yours,