Hi, everyone, I'm totally new to Linux so please bear with my stupid questions.

I'm running SuSE 9.0 with KDE and I downloaded the latest Wine source from winehq.com, and compiled it
by clicking on the "configure" file. The process went relatively smooth, all I needed to do was install a total of two additional packages to get the program to compile successfully. When I saw that an exacutable called "wine" (written in italics) was now showing up in my Wine directory, I was very pleased with myself, and clicked on it. Unfortuately, the exacutable won't work. When I click on it, I get a popup error titled "Sorry!" saying "couldn'f ind the program 'winewrapper'". When I try launching the executable using the console, I get the error "wine: could not locate Wine source tree".

I'm totally confused. I managed to download and run the latest Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird
builds just fine, but they're about the only programs I managed to download and run in the two days I've been using SuSE. Download, click on the executable with the funny console-esque icon, and there you go. As far as compiling is concerned, I haven't been very successful, either.

Does anyone happen to know what I'm doing wrong? Thanks in advance.

Well you could have just clicked to install wine with suse and then you wouldnt have had to compile it to begin with.

And for seconds, you don't run wine, you run the program you want to run.
You really should go read the wne help and faq's on the website, or your not gonna get anywhere.