I know this is an old-ish post, but figured I'd follow up on my success if anyone else is looking to do the same. Someone with better hardware might have better results without having to go through everything I did to make it work, but the distro I ended up settling with is Manjaro (cause ain't nobody got time for Arch) with i3 window manager and no desktop. I guess you can't really get much lighter than that and still have good functionality out of the box, but then again I'm not really an expert. .-.
Anyway, I plopped all these settings into Wine's regedit and it runs pretty good now, just as well if not faster than Windows 7. Just copy and save it as a .reg file, import into regedit, and reboot:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\AppDefaults]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\Fkenro.exe]
"Version"="winxp"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\Fkenro.exe\DllOverrides]
"*d3d8"="builtin"
"*d3d9"="builtin"
"*d3dim"="native"
"*d3drm"="native"
"*d3dx8"="native"
"*d3dx9_24"="native"
"*d3dx9_25"="native"
"*d3dx9_26"="native"
"*d3dx9_27"="native"
"*d3dx9_28"="native"
"*d3dx9_29"="native"
"*d3dx9_30"="native"
"*d3dx9_31"="native"
"*d3dx9_32"="native"
"*d3dx9_33"="native"
"*d3dx9_34"="native"
"*d3dx9_35"="native"
"*d3dx9_36"="native"
"*d3dx9_37"="native"
"*d3dx9_38"="native"
"*d3dx9_39"="native"
"*d3dx9_40"="native"
"*d3dx9_41"="native"
"*d3dx9_42"="native"
"*d3dx9_43"="native"
"*d3dxof"="native"
"*dciman32"="native"
"*ddrawex"="native"
"*devenum"="native"
"*dinput"="builtin"
"*dinput8"="builtin"
"*dmband"="native"
"*dmcompos"="native"
"*dmime"="native"
"*dmloader"="native"
"*dmscript"="native"
"*dmstyle"="native"
"*dmsynth"="native"
"*dmusic"="native"
"*dmusic32"="native"
"*dnsapi"="native"
"*dplay"="native"
"*dplayx"="native"
"*dpnaddr"="native"
"*dpnet"="native"
"*dpnhpast"="native"
"*dpnlobby"="native"
"*dsound"="builtin,native"
"*dswave"="native"
"*dwrite"=""
"*dxdiag.exe"="native"
"*dxdiagn"="native"
"*gameoverlayrenderer"=""
"*iexplore.exe"="native,builtin"
"*inetcpl.cpl"="native,builtin"
"*inseng"="native"
"*itircl"="native,builtin"
"*itss"="native,builtin"
"*jscript"="native,builtin"
"*mfc42"="native"
"*mfc42u"="native"
"*mlang"="native,builtin"
"*msdmo"="native"
"*mshtml"="native,builtin"
"*msimtf"="native,builtin"
"*msvcm90"="native,builtin"
"*msvcp90"="native,builtin"
"*msvcr100"="native,builtin"
"*msvcr80"="native,builtin"
"*msvcr90"="native,builtin"
"*msxml3"="native"
"*qcap"="native"
"*quartz"="native"
"*shdoclc"="native,builtin"
"*shdocvw"="native,builtin"
"*shlwapi"="native,builtin"
"*steamwebhelper.exe"="native,builtin"
"*streamci"="native"
"*urlmon"="native,builtin"
"*vcomp90"="native,builtin"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\Fkenro.exe\Direct3D]
"DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"
"Multisampling"="disabled"
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="pbuffer"
"RenderTargetLockMode"="disabled"
"RenderTargetModeLock"="disabled"
"StrictDrawOrdering"="disabled"
"UseGLSL"="disabled"
"VideoMemorySize"="128"