I happened to get Xnews working perfectly with cxoffice Pro 3.0.
Copy comctl32.dll, riched20.dll and riched32.dll frop windows XP to the root directory of Xnews.
Edit ~/.cxoffice/dotwine/config and put the following in it:
[AppDefaults\\Xnews.exe\\DllOverrides]
"*comctl32" = "native"
"riched20" = "native"
"riched32" = "native"
Note that the '*' before comctl32 is imperative in order to override the default entry of config.
Michel