2 problems
 

Problem 1:
Wine - Is it just me or is wine a royal pain in the @$$. I install it and then I get a library error(I'm at work and currently not on my linux box to give you the exact error)something about a libwine.so.1 cannot be opened. I copy that library from the source directory into /usr/lib, then run ldconfig and once again I get another library error, when I copied that one over it still said the lib could not be opened.
What is the best way to install wine(thorough instructions please).

Problem 2:
I downloaded blender(not the source code) and untarred the folder then placed it in my /opt directory and created a symlink to it. When I ran blender it locked up my system. I hit the reset button on my tower when it was booting up I saw some lines pop up mentioning something about uncorrectable errors and then it stopped. I hit the reset button again and at the initial bios screen underneath my list of drives I see a line that says "Primary Slave drive failed to initialize" or something to that effect. I hit ctrl-alt-del on my keyboard and rebooted the system. I didn't see that line but I went ahead and booted into windows, my windows installation ran slow and locked up when I tried to access my slave hd. I'm guessing hitting the reset button had some adverse effects on my drives. But has anyone else had any problems out of blender, would it be best to install it from the source code or download the program itself???

Any suggestions on either of the 2 problems would be great.

Well first of all about the wine, I've always had some kind of problem with wine. It's never been flawless while using it. I'm sure if you find some instructions of some sort by searching linuxquestions.org for a starter. I never really messed with it much... I mean hey, who wants to go back to windows? heh I'm sure there's a reason, but personally thats why I moved to Linux. About the Blender? NHOI, but I did a quick lookup and I think you'd be better to compile it if they offered source code.

i hope your file systems has not been modified...
get the install disks and boot like you would normally do with an new install.. check the hdd.. with fdisk & fsch
not by any chance the disk full?

here is the best way to install wine:
make sure you have all the developement software installed.
download the source.
gunzip and un-tar it ( tar zxvf wine-x.x.x.tar.gz )
change to the directory ( cd wine-x.x.x ) and type ./tools/wineinstall
follow the instructions.
If you have all of the devel stuff installed, there wont be a problem.

As for the other program, I dont know anything about it so i cant help ya.