Open Office help

[Joe]

Hi.  I'm running OOo 1.1.0 on Mandrake 9.1 rc2.  When I start OOo 
writer, it puts up a splash screen that stays on top of everything until 
it loads which takes about 11 minutes.  Then when I open a file (even 
less than one page long) it takes another 6 minutes and printing takes 
at least that long.  That's the old story.  I was resigned to it because 
I thought my old processor was just too slow to deal with it - PII 266 
MHz, 128MB ram, 30 GB main HD.

BUT, I just got a Knoppix 3.3 CD to play with.  Once I got it booted and 
figured out how to mount my home dir, I was able to load OOo 1.1 writer 
in about 3 minutes (with no splash screen!), load a 4 page file in less 
than 1 minute and print in less than one minute - just like downtown!

So, what the heck is going on in the OOo under Mandrake?

The only clue I have seen is something about making a font cache read 
only, but I tried to do that and either I got it wrong or it had no effect.
I have used fontdrake to get all my windoze fonts and I do use Times New 
Roman a lot (from Windoze).

Any ideas about why it's so slow and how to fix it and how to get rid of 
that maddening splash screen that blots out everything for 11 minutes?

Thanks.

Joe.

P.S.  I just got the OOo 1.1.1 CD but have not installed it yet.  I 
don't know if that will make any difference, but the knoppix and MDK 
OOo's both report 1.1, so I think they're at the same version.

-- 
"There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action." --Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)