Got it working! Thanks for your pointer of checking the logfile. I found some error about OLE and tried web search. A forum said installing riched20.dll and oleaut32.dll from native windows installation should work, although it did not refer to the exact error message I was getting. After copying those two files and setting them to native in winecfg, I can see the service desk client started up. Whether it works flawlessly as a application remains to be seen. Cheers.
