>Can you run windows applications on Ubuntu?
Yes. You can run some apps under wine. Quite a few actually.
Personally, what I like to do is install a windows virtual machine using virtual box and then use rdesktop to connect to the virtual machine.
It works VERY well and it’s free. I have two virtual XP machines on my laptop. The laptop runs Gentoo Linux natively. Even graphics intensive tasks such as Rhino3d CAD have acceptable performance running in the virtual XP machine.
You should be able to use synaptic to install wine and/or virtualbox under ubuntu.
how much ram do you have on the host and how much did you give to each VM