I'm not real fond of this opsys for things that need reliability, but sometimes Wine won't work and what choice do you have?
Here we use VirtualBox and run windows under a linux host, so almost no matter what weird thing it does, we are fine.
I plan to add some tips for that here -- getting USB to work can be a chore, but it's very do-able, despite taking a little extra time in the dox to get it going.
Then you can have it all.
Some other tips that are in the dox, but not easy to find right off:
Make your user (if your host is linux) a member of the vboxusers group, and things like USB will become available to the guest opsys -- even if they don't work in the host!
This only applies to the one you get from the sun/oracle repository. The best way to get that is to go there and follow their directions to add their respository to synapatic and then use that system to get it installed, as then it will also install guest additions, dkms, and be updated when Oracle releases a new version. The full GPL open source version of Virtual Box doesn't allow USB I/O, so you probably want the one that does.
Do install "guest additions" right away (you do this from the vbox GUI while the guest is running, right after installing the guest) -- a lot of stuff, like screen resolutions in the guest work better that way, and get autodetected by the guest (if it's XP) nicely. And things like audio work better -- you can play things from both the host and the guest at the same time and the host audio interface just mixes the audio -- sweet.
You can only fiddle settings when the guest isn't running, and that's where you go set up USB filters for what you want the guest to see. This way you can control things like the two opsys not fighting over stuff meant for guest only. For example, the main or only reason I run windows here at all is because my arbitary waveform generator, my digital oscilloscopes and my mass spectrometer are windows-only devices, no point in having linux access to them -- no drivers there, or the ones that look like a USB serial port -- they fight over ownership otherwise.