Start by upgrading to the latest development release. 1.0.1 is over a year old, and lots of things have been fixed since then. Office XP has a longstanding bug that prevents installation. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5163 There is test report in the AppDB that says it installs fine in 1.1.33, however, that person used a slipstreamed version that does not require a registration key, so it may not work for a regular installation. Both Office 2003 and 2007 install fine in current Wine. Access in general doesn't work very well in Wine. Wine has its own implementation of DirectX9; you shouldn't be installing real DirectX. Some games may need some native DirectX dlls; copy just the ones you need, or use winetricks d3dx9. http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks Check the AppDB to see if there are any howtos for the other apps you want to run. For problems with specific apps, post console output.