Could not load kernel32.dll

[lite1979]

So I upgraded from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS recently, and I've been really happy with the upgrade, except for gaming performance in wine. I only play half-life 1 and half-life 2, but I was noticing that when I had Pandora playing music in Firefox, I would get no sound in wine.

This led to me trying to uninstall wine and re-installing it several times. I removed my .wine folder, Steam, and all of my gaming content, and upon re-installing, I can't even open notepad.

lite@lite-desktop:~/.wine/drive_c$ wine notepad
wine: could not load kernel32.dll, status c0000135
lite@lite-desktop:~/.wine/drive_c$

I have been using this same PC since 2007, and I've only had linux on it (started with Kubuntu 7.04).

lite@lite-desktop:~/.wine/drive_c$ wine --version
wine-1.3.1
lite@lite-desktop:~/.wine/drive_c$

As you can see, I obviously have some older stuff hanging around on my hard drive. It should read wine 1.5.14, since that's what comes up when I run 'winecfg', but I'm totally lost at this point. What should I do? I know the Steam beta for Linux is coming out this month, and I'm going to fight tooth and nail to be one of the 1000 users chosen to test it, but I'd still like to figure out what I'm doing wrong, especially if I'm not one of the lucky few.

lite@lite-desktop:~/.wine/drive_c$ whereis wine
wine: /usr/bin/wine /usr/bin/X11/wine /usr/local/bin/wine /usr/local/lib/wine /usr/share/wine /usr/share/man/man1/wine.1.gz
lite@lite-desktop:~/.wine/drive_c$

The PC is an AMD Athlon 64x2 4800+ w/4GB RAM and an nvidia GT240. If it's time to finally format and install to a clean hard drive, I'll do that, but I want that to be a last option.
Thanks in advance!




Edit: I just tried wine64 notepad and it worked... Hmmm.

Edit again: I'm currently installing Steam using the terminal:

msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi