I never wanted to install wine, just didn't seem right. Well now I'm kicking myself in the ass for not doing this sooner. I was using Pan and BNR2, which aren't all that bad as long as you've never used Newsbin Pro
If someone's keeping a record of what works on what -
Ubuntu Dapper, latest wine beta (from wine HQ) 0.9.13, I set it up with Wine Tools, and installed all of the english options in Wine tools. And threw in quickpar for Newsbin's autorar function.
As far as I can tell everything except MOTD works. Only problem I've noticed is the screen redraw. Which is easily fixed with a minimize/maximize. Small RAM footprint of 50-60MB with ~300,000 header groups. The spool file seems to load faster, along with the search, when compared to Windows XP and NTFS.