In honor of .net 1.1 installing on today's git, here's a version of winetricks that knows how to grab and run the installer. Amusingly, I noticed that there are dozens of scripts out there that do this... it seems to be not uncommon in the windows world.
As always, winetricks is at http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks
and its source repository is at http://winezeug.googlecode.com
BTW if anybody has any other small whiny things that almost but not quite fit in winehq, I'd be happy to consider hosting them in the winezeug repository. - Dan