[Hooston]

Thankyou for the reassurance fluffysheep. Turning off the firewall and the virus checker is not the way to solve a problem! It is necessary to understand the settings and set up exceptions.

Windows has really tried to clean up its act in the last few years and the fact it is getting harder to run mods is in a way a sign they are finally getting somewhere. When the likes of Norton disappear the process will be complete.
The world is moving to only allowing apps from approved app stores, then running them in a "sandbox" with very limited access to the system. This can make modding and running old apps really difficult. Wine on Linux runs using the user's privileges, which in effect means each user creates their own virtual windows PC running whichever version of Windows they choose. To be honest I can see a market for "Wine for Windows" instead of the various compatibility modes.

Windows used to override a system dll if there was a different version of the dll in the same directory as the application. A big security hole! Wine will not do this automatically, so to get SH3 widescreen mods to run on Wine/Linux you have to run winecfg, select libraries and override the following dlls to use the hacked copies in the SH3 folder:
d3d9 (native/builtin)
msvcp71 (native/builtin)
msvcr71 (native/builtin)

Then edit d3d9.ini in the SH3 folder and make sure that the screen resolution and refresh rate is something supported by your PC/monitor, e.g.
DisplayWidth=1366
DisplayHeight=768
Refreshrate=false