I'm running mandrake 8.1 and want to run a large program from a shared Dir on a windows box because the windows box has a 40 gig on it and i have 50 megs free space left plus my 150 meg swap partition on my linux drive. Can I run this without it attempting to download the program to disk using wine???

First I couldn't understand what are you trying to do.
I reached this thread seeing the very interesting subject you have added.
Yes you can use some programs of windows under linux using samba,but it would be very slow,a better idea would be to copy the windows directory in the harddisk(through samba) and use that with wine.Now if you use your windows program from another computer through samba it would be a little faster.

i have very little hard drive space on my linux machine. I just need to know if there is a way to run executables using wine from a windows share without transfering them localy.

Normally a windows executable(32 bits) require dll(dynamic link library) to operate most of which are in the installation directory of the program or the windows directory(usually root(//Windows or //windows/system32 or //windows/system).So running them under your linux box require the dll too.And of course you can run them in your sytem using samba and wine.In wine configuration file :in paths of the windows directory and system directories you have to give the smb path of the windows directories.That means that those dlls and executables are used from your windows machine.The problem with this approach is that it is very very slow:the files have to be copied to your physical memory before you can run it in your linux box.The choice is yours.Since nowadays harddisks don't cost that much ,maybe you can buy one.

thanx for the info.