Wine 7.9 (staging) on Xubuntu 22.04

[MR ZenWiz]

I've been reading the ongoing discussion of cheap Windows licenses,
which then shifted to Wine. I thought I'd give Wine another try - it's
never succeeded for me before in what I need most - Office (at any
level, but preferably 2003 and up).

I installed Wine's staging version, 7.9, using the instructions at
https://linuxhint.com/install_wine_-ubuntu_20-24/ and all seemed to go
fairly well. I can run the explorer and that seems to work fine.

Then I try to install MS Office using a copy of Office 2010
Professional I have had sitting around for years.  I used to run it on
my Windows VMs, but I recently upgraded to Office 2016 (for my Win10
Virtualbox VM only). This is where it goes bollocks. The installation
always aborts trying to run msiexec.exe. I have the backtrace file
from the error, but I don't know if it's worth posting here - it's 209
lines of Windows crash info.

I tried running both with the architecture environment variables unset
(implicitly 64-bit) and with them set as:

WINEARCH=win32
WINEPREFIX=/home/admar/.wine32

No luck there. Every time it eventually dies with an error.

Is there a way around this (and what)? I don't play Windows (or any
computer) games except rarely and I can stick with the ones in Linux.
Office is what I need (or a real equivalent, not LibreOffice).

Comments welcome.

Mark