Just a followup on playing games under wine. Reader Rabbit plays flawlessly under wine. No complaints at all.
It seems that a lot of kids games these days are written in shockwave or flash, and so there is really no difficulty running them natively under Linux if you can get to the actual .swf file. However, many of them are embedded in .exe files, and so you have to go through the wine layer to get to them.
Anyways, that's the next thing to try with some of these games that are resisting my efforts.