headless question, and IPC question

[Ken Larson]

I'm using wine to access a particular proprietary DLL (I don't have the 
source for it) on Linux.  The way I'm doing this is to write an EXE that 
wraps the DLL, and makes all of the functions available via socket 
request and response messages.  My linux program has access to the 
functions of the DLL by sending socket messages to the EXE running under 
wine.  2 questions:

1. My DLL/EXE uses no calls to pop up graphical windows, so 
theoretically no display is needed.  Of course wine needs a display 
because it does not know that an EXE won't make such calls.  Is there a 
way to run wine with a null or dummy display - so that it is effectively 
running headless?

2. The sockets trick was the simplest way I could figure out how to do 
IPC between a linux process and a wine process.  However, is there are 
any better or faster way to do this?  As far as I know I can't use 
winelib because I don't have the source to the DLL.

Thanks,

Ken Larson