we used to run programs on WIN98SE, Win2000 and XP using for instance
QUICKTIME or being programmed in Pascal using graphics.
Some people are using powerpoint-presentations and WINWORD-Textfiles. Both
with problems since StarOffice 8 PP5 is not transferring everything exactly.
So some of those people don't want to take Staroffice or whatever. If it is
not working the way they did it, forget it.
What a pitty... And I have also seen people behave like that. They don't want any change. They would only accept Staroffice if it was identical to MSoffice, including trivial things such as the color of the interface....
Worse, if they see any bug in Staroffice they shout and scream, but they accept bugs in MSOFFICE in a hourly basis... people are just afraid of what's new. Be it with science, nuclear power, or simple things like software... But back on topic,
I made a few experiments with wine, but had problems with charactersizes in
graphics, if it was running at all.
Weird. Wine runs Office pretty well. Maybe you should try a more recent version of wine, or ask for help in the wine mailing list, or try helper programs like winetools and helper websites like the Frank's corner.
Or, if you want it to be a piece of cake, you can buy Codeweavers's Crossover Linux product. You probably have heard of them. They sell an enhanced version of Wine (and they work actively on the Wine project and contribute code back to them) and sell it to Linux and Mac OS, with support. It is cheap and, IIRC, Microsoft Office 2000 is officially supported.
Is a virtual machine a better alternative to wine?
I have never tried, but I suspect a vm would be quite resource intensive. If you can get Office working under wine, you could use that. If you need more reliability, you could buy the Codeweavers's product.