Michael,
Actually, it does not work in wine at all - sorry for the confusion. I tried it in VirtualBox though (similar to vmWare), and it installed and started fine - it just had a problem with direct3d, so you cant see anything in the four viewport windows - everything else seemed fine though. 3d Studio Max has exactly the same behaviour, but if you go into the settings and tell it to use OpenGL, everything is superb.