Many apps, including Office 2003, install their own version of gdiplus. Prior to 1.1.38, Wine would use the native gdiplus that was installed by the app itself, without the user needing to set an override. 1.1.38 includes a patch that changes this, so Wine now uses its builtin gdiplus even if the app installs its own version. Apps for which Wine's gdiplus is inadequate, such as Office 2003, will now have problems they never had before, including possibly crashing. The workaround is to manually set an override for gdiplus in winecfg. If the change in gdiplus behavior is the cause of your problem, that should fix it. If it doesn't fix it, you're looking at a separate issue. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21604
