Guys..... To avoid the problem with openoffice, just be sure you environement variable OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP is set to gnome: in ~/.bashrc: export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome
personnaly, this fixed the problem with older versions, now i see there's a ~/etc/profile.d/openoffice-beta.sh that does just that, it is owned by openoffice-base-beta 3.1.0_ooo310_m9-1 in extra. Regards, Charly
