When opening OpenOffice in ML9.0 download edition, it hangs for a seriously long time, probably 3-5 minutes. The OpenOffice splash screen hangs in the middle of the screen and won't let any windows show on top of it. Once open, Open Office works just fine. I saw a post somewhere that said to be sure CUPS is started, tried that, still same problem. Any ideas?

I am not sure what the problem is with that, but the OpenOffice.org that comes with Mandrake 9.0 has other problems too.

I'm gonna download the official version I think. Just to save all the hassles.

BTW, I like your nick.

Hmmm, I'm curious. Do you use Gnome or KDE? Do the other things respond while it hangs?
I have OpenOffice which starts fine but then it would just freeze the whole system while I'm using it and nothing responds (Gnome also freezes). Only the mouse moves on the screen. I have not tried to leave it to see if it recovers, I reboot!!
I'll be curious to see what answers people have to your question.

Nothing else freezes, just nothing else will open over the splash screen, it opens behind it, and you cannot see the window! I am running KDE, and I haven't yet checked Gnome. I may just remove the package and download OO from Sun. But, any help to make this one work would be helpful. BTW, is there any significant advantage to purchasing Star Office?

That seems to be normal operation - that is how it works for me and worked while I was on RH 7.3. Slow to start, but works fine afterwards. There is a way to disable the splashscreen, however, I just forget where I have read about that. StarOffice won't be faster either, and OO has a nicer splash screen . I did 2 reinstall of MDK9, and the last time I didn't even choose OO - installed the version I downloaded separately, because spellchecker is broken in MDK install - I saw many users complain about that too, but it doen't seem to be a problem for many of you (though it was for me in each of my previous installs). It might be that MDK puts it in a different directory than the separate OO version puts itself - but I didn't look into the matter, since it works fine now. Also, the help files seem to be missing if I install it from MDK install CDs.

If you decide to install it separately, make sure that you remove its libraries - when I uninstalled it once, OO was only partially removed - look for libsomething (begins with lib and ends in office or something like that) in Mandrake Controll Center> Remove Software.

I just noticed: 3-5 minutes??? That seems too much - what sort puter do you have? OO/StarOffice eats a lot of memory and resources. On my 700duron 128ram it takes 30-40 seconds to start up.

My puter is a 1.4ghz AMD Athlon XP 1600 sitting on an ECS K7S5A mobo, currently 128megs of RAM, though usually more like 512megs. (Had to put some memory in my mothers puter over the weekend, so mine got robbed!) Probably the slowest thing I have is a Rage 128 32meg video card, but even at that, it should be overkill for this app. I really like everything else about ML9.0, but this is really irritating. Could it possibly have anything to do with OpenOffice on one of my other partitions? I have a 98 fat32 and a 2000 ntfs on the same computer, both with Open Office.

I don't think your other OO installs are the cause - especially if they sit on your windows partitions. I pretty much a newbie in linux, so I can't give better advice than: wipe out your default OO install - including libOOsomething (don't forget to delete OO folders from your HOME directories and root as well if you used OO as root) - and install a download version, so this way you well have the help files installed correctly, and would possibly avoid problems with spellchecking (should there be any - it seems that for some users it works, for other doesn't)
I have a vague memory of OO having startup problems if certain services are not running ... so it might be possible that this might be behind your slow startup. Anyone knows about these (I remember something about certain libraries loaded when you start up your system that when missing, OO has to load them separatelly, which takes some time)??? hmmmm... it might be that it is not exactly services but some libraries that are loaded when KDE or X starts up... doh... I forgot completely where I have read that thread about this issue, since I never had similar problems... :roll: Don't worry, there should be a solution to this problem...

Let me throw this in there............. I uninstalled OpenOffice as it were, downloaded a new copy from Sun, deleted the directory in Home, installed the fresh copy, and el whammo. It does it again. Same problem. Three to five minutes to boot up OpenOffice. I even got my new memory in so I am back up to 512mb. Here is another symptom........when loading is when it takes so long, after it is open, I can up additional OO windows that pop up immediately. Kinda weird. I gotta say I am getting a little frustrated though. I came over from Lycoris, and I gotta say, it sure was alot easier getting stuff running! It just didn't have the features that ML9.0 does. I have to have OO because all my files on Win partitions is saved in those formats. PLEASE HELP!!!