Alright, I am still struggling to get openoffice running inside a 32bit Sarge chroot here, and the latest development is that as a matter of fact openoffice does NOT hang when you try to start a new document. It just takes a really really long time to do it.
When I follow how much use it makes of the processor during its hanglike phase, it starts at about 6% and it slowly goes down to almost zero, over, I don't know, like 15-20 minutes or something. Then it wakes back up and starts working smoothly. That's pretty strange. Has anybody seen or heard anything like this before? I could also try to put this up on one of the openoffice.org lists... Oh, and I should have also added to the previous email that before you can do anything you need to fix sed. You can't apt-get anything without fixing sed. You do that by finding a good copy of the sed.info.gz file and copying it over the one in /usr/share/info/sed.info.gz. Also, you need to do dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt edit the file, hold sed and base-config and then do dpkg --set-selection < selections.txt before you start apt-getting the main stuff, like X, kde, gnome, openoffice, mozilla, etc. Those two packages are broken right now, so you can't upgrade them. Hope they get fixed soon. Alex.