If you want to use Mono with a Wine prefix, do not install .NET into that prefix. Once you've installed .NET in a prefix, there is no clean way to reverse that. If you have installed Mono in the prefix using its official Windows installer, and you haven't installed .NET, Wine should use that. The winehq wiki page http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono ("Installation" and "Using Custom Mono Builds in old Wine") describe exactly how Wine searches for Mono. If you want to force it, you can make a symlink from c:\windows\mono\mono-2.0 to C:\Program Files\Mono-2.8.1. I don't understand any of what you're saying about OLE. If you're getting any messages from mscoree, maybe I can help with that.