I have managed to finally get Strong's numbers to popup running e-sword with wine on linux.
You need to install the following using winetricks:
msftedit
msls31
msxml3
vb6run
vcrun6
wsh57
I believe the trick was to install msftedit which installs Microsoft Richedit 4.1. It takes about 15 minutes to download running 300 kb/sec.