You can run virtually all micro$haft programs on linux by going through wine or vmware. Or any other programs designed for W32. The only exceptions would be programs that make certain os specific system calls (namely, the one not included in wine or vmware) or programs specifically designed to make those calls to thwart linux. Office 2000, office xp, photoshop, maya, etc. will run fine under linux but it'll take more than 20 minutes to set them up.
But, if you gotta run Windows, doing so within VMWare, under Linux, is a great way to do it. It seems more stable that way. The only things that don't work in the VMWare environment are some games that use certain DirectX procedures. Windows Media Player works, though, much to my surprise!