Michael,

No special video driver was installed - the machine is a Dell Studio notebook with 15" screen - and the video card is on the MB - just installed Ubuntu and then Wine and then played around with the DLL's to see what I needed to get MoI to work. Updating gdi as you advised got everything else to work fine.

I looked at VM's and Emulators and even VNC but this is the best solution for me because it involves native DLL's and not much extra software complexity. Plus Linux is lean and mean and fast to boot - which is what I need most of all. Wonder if Steve Ballmer is going to do a Windows Lite one day ;-)

And impressively MoI seems to be as fast as it was under Windows - I was expecting some speed penalty but doesn't seem to be any. This is the last app that I needed to move across. Everything else I need has a Linux equivalent. Oh except for one other older specialist app that just stopped working a month or so ago after *some* Windows Update stuff arrived - and that also runs beautifully under Wine. I am going to rebuild that to a native Linux app when I get some time.

If you can make V3 install and work seamlessly under Wine then that will be nearly as good as going *native*.

Actually this really does look as though it will eliminate the need for a Linux port. I will report back after I have hammered it for a while to see if there are any weaknesses.

Regards,

Roger