Had a little free time and went ahead and tried compiling. Went MUCH smoother than I would have hoped with none of the fiddling I had read can be necessary compiling wine.
For anyone in the same situation, here's what I did.
I followed the compiling directions
here with the code modification listed
here (under Part III Troubleshooting, section 3 where it says "EVERYTHING IS FINE EXCEPT..."). I backed up my EQ directory, rm -r 'd my old .wine directory, ran winecfg and copied the old EQ directory back in and it worked right off the block.
The directions are for Lenny, but they look generic enough that they'd work on Etch or Debian derived distros like the 'buntus, mint, etc.
My only challenge left is to see if it'll work in KDE (for some reason I get crashes unless I use GNOME).
Solved!
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