Paul Menzel > 1. How is a CLI illiterate user supposed to do this? How do you expect to use wine while being CLI illiterate. Thinking all information to resolve why applications don't run come out on the CLI. Winecfg only configures inside a prefix. Third party tools exist to provide a user interface with prefixs. Big issue with Winecfg is that it uses wine own graphical interfaces that cannot operate without a wine prefix. How can you say snookered. > 2. Would the use of different Wine prefixes result in more resource > usage since for example the registry is not shared? As what others have said a wine prefix costs bugger all. The gains out weight it costs. ie Applications not conflicting with each other and ending up dead. > 3. Using Wine prefixes gives me more than I asked for, I think. I just > want all files belonging to program files go into a different directory > than `~/.wine/`. Still if I do this with Wine prefixes I have to set the > `WINEPREFIX` variable for the user and the whole Wine configuration and > installed applications will go there? Is this recommended? Yes its recommended for the reason of application conflits and that if something happens to lets say a drive that one wineprefix is on the other remains operational. At the low cost why not. Please look at the menu entries wine creates. You will find WINEPREFIX is embedded. Users are allowed by WINEPREFIX's as many as they like. Basically you don't want a registry solution but want a better front end for what is already in wine. Debuging monitoring is another area that wine suxs in graphical. Maybe the solution would be adding wine to http://libvirt.org/ so http://virt-manager.org/ could be used to manage prefixs.