I have three printers configured: 2 HP's and CUPS-PDF. Print preview behaves identically regardless of which printer is selected in Print Setup. If it's a driver issue, I would expect a problem with one printer and not the rest. Or at least some differences, unless there's code in Wine that handles a portion of printing function regardless of the specific driver selected. Anyway, like I said earlier, I've found a native linux program that works as advertised and directly supports industry-standard file formats like MusicXML which NWC doesn't.
I tried 1 staff, 6 measures, 14 chords, plus slurs. With 5 slurs, preview worked. With 6 slurs, preview and entire program locked. Removed 1 slur, preview worked. It's not the number of them, it was one slur in particular that did it. Sure sounds like it's something NWC is doing, not just Wine. Perhaps something that Windows tolerates and shouldn't? Kinda like poorly written HTML that a browser allows. Anyway, it's not predictable, some songs do it and some don't. I guess the bottom line is that for the end user it doesn't matter a lot whether it's NWC or Wine that is the culprit. Broke is broke.
The latest update of Wine to 1.5.29 fixed the issue with NWC not running. Now it runs as before. Still have the issue with print preview crashing. The test files weren't much help. It's related to slurs and it doesn't always take too many to crash it either. Seems like after 2+ years someone would have figured it out though.
For how I use NWC, a broken print preview is a deal-breaker. I need the ability to adjust sizes & margins along with emf output that only comes with the preview. So,.... guess even though I paid for NWC I'll be further ahead to go through the exercise of converting to musicxml and then using Musescore. The price is right and it works without crashing; 2 points in its favor!
As near as I can figure out, it's a shell32.dll thing. I can make it work by being really brutal on the registry, not a good fix though. It nearly works with an override. Starts and runs for a short time before crashing. Would be nice if there's a real solution.
NWC (registered version) had been working for a while on Wine but today it gave up the ghost. I have the latest version of NWC (2.5.5), Kubuntu 12.10, Wine 1.5.28. The first symptom today that came back from a while ago is the print preview: it worked on some files, but ones with quite a few slurs crashed it. Then the program quit working altogether. It paints part of the screen, then I get the Wine error message box: "The program NWC2.exe has encountered a serious problem....." Clicking Show Details doesn't show any details. The only way out of it is to terminate the wine session. The NWC Demo works fine but my registered copy doesn't.
