My problem was this: I am running wine.i686 on an x86_64 Fedora 13 distro. Consequently, the hal library libhal.so.1 that I had on my system was for 64 bits. I solved by installing hal-libs.i686 (at least that's what it's called for Fedora users) and that solved my problem. Thanks to Vitamin for seeing my problem, and also to Dimesio for help provided!
