salmoni Why OpenOffice won't load: Your Gnome session manager probably thinks applications which fail to start in 15 seconds are caught in an endless loop, and aborts them. 15 seconds used to be the default, but recent distributions use a longer value to give OpenOffice time to start. I use gnome-session --purge-delay=300000. That's milliseconds.

On my system, OpenOffice would invariably be aborted the first time I tried to start it, but next time everything was in memory, so it was able to finish in time.

Here's the bug report