This will be a work in progress until I get Mass Effect working better for myself. Please visit WineHQ's Mass Effect forum as they have made fantastic progress on getting Mass Effect to work.
Installation fails on extraction of "saferun.exe" or "saferun.dll"
This is caused by a disk read error, not the installation program or Wine. If you have this error you will also find that
any program, such as StuffIt Expander, attempting to extract "data02.rar" will also fail. Please read this
Mass Effect Community forum post for a discussion of the issue.
Short of your DVD drive failing, the solution is to clean off the DVD surface; use alcohol or your cleaning solvent of choice.
"Mass Effect Configuration Utility" fails to start
BioWare notes in the 1.01 patch change log that the configuration utility may crash on multi-core computers. As of patch 1.01 this issued is fixed.
Nothing is displayed in either Video or Audio panel of Configuration Utility
The Configuration Utility does not have access to Microsoft's XML library.
The solution is to install the "Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) 3.0" library through CrossOver's Install Software... panel.