how can we fix this? can we somehow port some of the Wine files to windows 9x?

Why port Wine when we have windows? From last time I recall, Steam fully supported win9x. They only introduce a system check to prevent us from using it artificialy! You'd have to disable that check by hacking the *.exe but Steam probably verifies it's own files... Besides, maybe now there are unresolved dependencies. Anyway, I guess you'd have to check in this direction...