So I tried running some of running some of wine utilities on real windows installation (win server 2019, that’s what i had on hand).

Turns out some of them work. I only copied into C:\windows only those I tested beforehand (by running from C:\windows2 directory created by me). I had luck with:

taskmgr
clock
notepad
cmd
winemine (minesweeper)
regedit
explorer

Didn’t work:

explorer as a shell (more below)
control
iexplore

Iexplore was giving errors about some dll (even though it was present). Control gave me only spinning circle for a while and then nothing.

Explorer launched but was very glitchy. Address bar was behind column headers. Crashed once. Most UI buttons were not responding with anything (like sorting by item type or properties). Other than that it was able to copy file normally.

Task manager was giving me different readout for memory consumption. Other than that rest worked perfectly. I only tested .exe files because i don’t know what each .dll does.

Now I think about grafting windows’ dlls into some wine prefix (maybe more games will work). There is also React OS project that could work better for windows install, although older one). Maybe copying original dll’s into React could make it more stable (this is something devs can’t do due to copyright).

cc @freemo