"Material navigator and material editor will not open libraries of maps or materials" sounds like a wine bug, please file a report at http://bugs.winehq.org with a recipe to repeat the problem. The help viewer thing might be a wine bug, you can tell by getting gmax and its help files installed and working on Windows; if the same procedure fails on Wine, it's a wine bug. My first computers were all single chip microprocessors: z-80, 6502, 6803, and a CMOS PDP-8 clone. My Dad was an EE, and I did a lot of wire-wrapping for him.
