Resurrecting this old thread after more than a year in the hope that maybe someone will have some kind of idea or suggestion... I'm now using wine-1.4-rc1, and still am unable to get past the FFXI character selection screen. I still cannot install the Altana expansion DVD yet either. Unfortunately borrowing the English version to test is not possible for me, as I live in Japan. Buying it from overseas and having it shipped here is of course possible, but I'm not prepared to spend money just to simply test if something works or not. Sorry. There seems to be at least one other person who has the same or similar problem, and posted a bug about it here: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28861 I've added my comments to that bug for now.
