I seem to have a virus in wine

I assume that by IE you mean MS Internet Explorer. Could it merely be an icon to alert you to an update being available?

Yeah Windown software often suffers from that. I'd recommend you to run a full system virus scan from the host system (not a Win32 app AV scanner execed in wine) to ensure your host system wasn't yet modified in any way. Try the link [http://www.free-av.de/en/index.html] which is from a german AV distributor. It's currently europes best AV solution. Install the latest Linux version and perform (as already mentioned) a full system scan. You don't need dazuko and the real time scanner. ;-)

Good Luck!

to fix your IE just reinstall it after the scan (no matter wether something was fund or not). You can try to fix it with a Wine app but have to go trough some of these win procedures then...

Answer is yes..
Windows applications work the same way in Wine as they do in Windows. So in short:
Yes - Security is an issue.

Long answer with infos:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=543419

For security issues:

You probably should be behind a router with firewall or install something like firestarter.

Ubuntu comes with a firewall installed: IPTables. Firestarter is just a GUI front end for it.

Now the next common question that people ask is there a way to "stealth/hack" your ports via IPTables config files without installing Firestarter as a GUI?

answer is: When you install Ubuntu, iptables is there, but it allows all traffic by default.

I can bet you that on a default install when you run the command

sudo iptables -nL the result you get is

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

=all traffic allowed ;-)

When you start using p2p applications you become extremely visible and you get all kinds of unwanted connection attempts. If your PC is sat there online with an (possibly unsupported and untrusted) application listening on multiple (or even unknown random) ports you really should have some control over the traffic. So you can learn iptables or use a gui frontend, hence my suggestion to use Firestarter or similar. For a desktop user a nice gui interface fits the Ubuntu philosophy much better than expecting users to correctly set iptables rules by hand and it's very easy and quick to set up. If you don't have iptables configured one way or the other your security policy comes down to only using invulnerable applications (no, I can't think of any either) and unbreakably strong passwords. Good luck.

Next use clam AV to scan for viruses in the same folder (because it effects ONLY THE WINE FOLDER IN WHICH YOU HAVE INSTALLED) so no serious worries mate......

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ClamAV

Regards

Bhavani Shankar.

Cheers all helpful and reassuring