I don't have java on my path for some reason, but when I added it, your experiment worked for me on my Fedora Linux system running wine-1.3.33. >From Linux bash, I execute .wine/drive_c/windows/system32/cmd.exe >From the C:\> prompt, I execute set PATH=C:\bin;C:\windows\system32;C:\windows;C:\Program Files\Java\j6re\bin java -version Java reports version 1.6.0_26.