>I have settled on a VM with XP for my old win stuff. Only rule I follow: no internet from there.
>I have not had that much roboting to do in the last few years, in part due to shunning IE automation.
>Firm resolve here: next task roboting will be either in Selenium or with bought modern tool, depending on use case.
>If I use vfp, use it clearly separated and do all marshalling/communication/messaging/analysis wia JScript and a broker object.

Not quite my case. If I had to parse any webpages (which I still do, in one case), it's httpGetEx(), not browser automation.

>Is it worth the effort to tweak wine if I can have my isolated VM mostly unpatched under Linux as well ?

Yes, in terms of peace of mind - no M$ stuff at all except Fox itself. So I don't have to keep the split personality aka two OSes on the same box, remember what's on VM's local disk and what's in shared space etc etc. Now it's all together. Notice my new employer... :), I'm finally doing what I wanted for years. Spent a whole day moving the stuff I wanted to keep and then shut down the W7 VM. Bliss.

So... still looking for an answer to this:

>>Now that I got rid of Windowses, the slight trouble remains that several among my favorite tools (class browser, environment manager, GoFish) use a browser object in this or that shape, and it's not available by default under wine. Does anyone still bother with this kind of setup, and has some useful advice, or should I continue investigating on my own?
>>
>>The Ole2 field in the vcxes where I was using it, it says OLEObject = C:\WINDOWS\System32\shdocvw.dll - if that helps any.
>>In some other cases, it's OLEObject = C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ieframe.dll - go figure.