Office 97: VBA editor flashes onto screen, then disappears

[Island]

Running Debian Etch with msttcorefonts installed, and Wine 0.9.58

Office 97 (Excel, Word, Powerpoint only, not Outlook etc) installed fine using Winecfg 'out of the box', setting default environment to Windows 98. Office 97 includes VBA, which can be started from Word's or Excel's menu: 'Tools, Macros, Visual basic Editor'. (The VBA editor is normally 3 panes, two file/housekeeping panes on the left, and a large pane on the right containing program modules into which you can enter VBA statements.) Starting the editor in either app results in the 3 pane editor flashing very briefly onto the screen, then immediately closing. This also happens with the environment set to Vista instead of Windows98. From the appdb, and various other comments and blogs, Office 97 is believed to work well, so I'm probably doing something wrong, here. Would be grateful for any pointers.

I've run Excel with a 'wine log', as described in the guidelines. On initial loading of Excel (which seems fine, by the way, and I can load several linked spreadsheets correctly, etc), the log reads:

Code: Select all

fixme:shell:SHAppBarMessage msg=5, data={cb=36, hwnd=(nil), callback=34faec, edge=812431157, rc=(3472084,-2138832896)-(0,0), lparam=5}: stub
fixme:ole:OaBuildVersion Version value not known yet. Please investigate it !
ALSA lib seq_hw.c:457:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such file or directory

With a blank spreadsheet, after clicking Excel's menu: 'Tools, Macros, Visual Basic Editor', the Editor flashes into screen then off, and the log next reads:

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fixme:ole:OaBuildVersion Version value not known yet. Please investigate it !
fixme:ole:DllDebugObjectRPCHook stub
fixme:storage:StgCreateDocfile Transacted mode not implemented.
err:ole:TLB_ReadTypeLib Loading of typelib L"C:\\windows\\system32\\MSForms.TWD" failed with error 2
fixme:typelib2:ICreateTypeLib2_fnSetHelpContext (0xf28a90,0), stub!
err:ole:TLB_ReadTypeLib Loading of typelib L"C:\\windows\\system32\\MSForms.TWD" failed with error 2
fixme:typelib2:ICreateTypeLib2_fnSetHelpContext (0xe1c2f0,0), stub!

I haven't run winetricks - the msttcorefonts are already loaded, and one comment I read suggested that DCOM98 was not very reliable anymore in Wine (which tried to provide the environment needed, itself). (I don't know what DCOM98 is, or whether it would help, but was put off by the comment.)

Would like to try some other things, but not sure what, so any suggestions welcome.

regards, Island