I have never used crossover but I have always used wine. It works fine on my
8.04. There are some programs that dont work at all on wine.Your permissions
have to be right and I also use the emulat a desktop . You have to set the size.
It is faster and some programs will work in it that did notr witout it.

And why would that be Unthinkable?

Millions of Windows users have stuck with the "downgrade" of XP, over
Vista. ;-)

Latest is seldom the Greatest...and with Ubuntu's 6-month renumbering
cycle, those with the latest number OS, end up being beta testers.
They don't call it Beta software...but with the large numbers of
problems reported each update cycle, it obviously is not ready for
prime time upon each release date.

I know Ubuntu cultists will disagree, but it's the Truth.

A happy MEPIS 7 (Debian Etch) user, not suffering through the problems
reported with each new Ubuntu iteration,

I had the same view about ubuntu for a few months... until a couple of
weeks ago! I don't feel they give themselves enough time to test.
Opensuse test their new version for six months - with a new version
release every 8/9 months. BUT they still have problems and their
repositories are nothing like as well defined as ubuntu. As Gobby said
in one email, after trying a few others one comes back to ubuntu.

Each distro has its drawbacks and for me ubuntu's big advantage is the
documentation, this yahhoogroup and ubuntu/kubuntu forums. I was going
to try mepis but there is little documentation and i've decided to
stick to ubuntu LTS versions

So far every problem I have run into from Ubuntu I have gotten answers to
either in this forum or on google search (with the exception to stuff that
is not able to be run on Linux).

Please up date your system. Wine was updated last night and you'll be ask to
restart your system after the updates are completed. This may fix the problem of
wine not running.