Mhh. I just discovered that some other apps also fail to recognize msvc*8*.dll. Looks like my .wine was broken. I created a new .wine, executed winetricks again and this time, I received a whole bunch new dirs in winsxs. Copied the new dirs back to my old .wine, Halo 2 now recognizes the DLLs! I have no idea why, but it failed to properly create everything inside my old .wine. However, there arises a new problem. I summed it up in Bug 13304 (http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13304) Getting this to work will be very interesting indeed...
