Can Wine and its programs be set to use Ubuntu file manager instead of Wine Explorer?

The most promising approach seems to me to set MIME types for all files of interest. Have a look at How to associate all file types within Wine with its corresponding native application?

Other things I tried, but didn't work: /usr/bin/winefile is a simple wrapper script, you can replace or change it. For example, to use thunar as your file manager in wine, add after the #comment lines

thunar $@
exit

You can leave the rest as it is, to be able to undo your changes.

Second approach, not working: looking in system32 for winefile.exe and explorer.exe, replacing them with softlinks to thunar. Wine ignores this, even a double-click on this softlinks runs winefile instead of thunar.

It seems to me that winefile is a builtin of wine. Maybe some registry edits could change wine's behaviour.

In Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 A quick review of the code in /usr/bin/winefile indicates that the answer is no. after checking to see if it's called with a directory name it clearly is using wine to launch the file manager regardless.

Excerpt:

if [ -x "$appdir/wine" ]; then exec "$appdir/wine" "$appname" "$@"; fi

# finally look in PATH
exec wine "$appname" "$@"

Since wine is designed to launch Windows executables It won't launch native apps. I would assume that using wine to launch the file selection routine is necessary in order to insure that the proper parameter is passed after file selection. This opinion is purely based on logic (and the content of /usr/bin/winefile). If you have information to the contrary please comment and share.

i think no. even i have use crossover with enabled "use native browser by default" it still use it's own file browser when i tried to open file from ms. word