.net 4.0 difficulty

I was trying to install a Windows app that apparently insists on using .net 4.0 and nothing newer. The "debugging" information provided says that a Windows 7 environment will have .net 4.0 already installed, and a Windows 8 will have .net 4.5.

I'm not sure if all my experiments went as they should, but the end result was that the installation still quits complaining about a bad .net 4.0 installation.

I tried uninstalling .net 4.5 and then installing a .net 4.0 from MS, but that fails stating that there is a later version already installed.

I even tried uninstalling all of the Wine components and then reinstalling them.

I even tried setting the default Wine environment to W8 think that would accept the .net 4.5 environment, but the installation still complained about not finding .net 4.0.

I have a slow workaround; installing the program under the W10 Insider Preview ruing under VMWare on Ubuntu. But as I said, that's slooooow.