I recently got mandrake 10.0, and i am a total newb. I downloaded the .rpms for wine, and all the 3 .rpms for giFt. I clicked on them, and KDE said they were installed, but I cant locate them in any menu. Does anyone have any suggestions? Did I install them wrong?

Probably not. If kde apps told you they were installed, this should be correct. The thing is: the rpms didn't create the menu entry automatically.
You can solve it by yourself right-clicking in the K icon (that launches the k menu) and choosing the menu editor. Just choose the category, add a new entry, and point to the executable of the program you want to create an entry to.
To find the executable, open a console and do
whereis name-of-the-lost-program
Console should give you the complete path of the program. With time and experience, you will not need to research this every time. Paths are quite standard.

Also, you can try to load the program just by typing its name in the command line. If its in your path, it will load.

Thank you, the whereis command doesnt seem to be working, so i cant find the path of the executable.

You can also find the executable by searching with the search utility on konqueror. There are places that are more likely to be found, though: /usr, /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.
You can query the rpm database by doing
rpm -q name-of-the-program
to see if a program was installed.

I installed giFT-curs from source, and i know where the executable is, but when i click on it, it doesnt launch. Any one know what the problem might be?

try reinstalling the rpm using "rpm -ivh --replacepkgs 'packagename'" in a terminal.