OK I wiped heroic from my Nix config and installed it via flatpak instead (hoping this had some effect due to higher dependency encapsulation) No dice so far. Trying out winetricks...
Nice! Used the winetricks button in the UI as you suggested, which did... something... and now ther is some audio!
The only issue now is that the audio level is exceptionally low. Less than ideal, but better than nothing (and I don't have to suffer through the pain of creating a Wintendo)
the UI plus adjusting audio via pavucontrol seems to have done the trick. Spent a half of a day trying to get Windows to install on an SSD only to fail A few hours to get it working on Linux. Maybe 2025 will be the year of the Linux desktop after all Thanks for the help