Amen, it may truly come down to that, no? :-)

Yes, Open Office does work much better indeed... though launching it still takes like forever. For fun, do try the "quickstart" option (Tools -> Options -> memory). When you exit ooo3, it places an icon and a menu in the application status area, next to the battery icon... and yes, you can quick launch the various ooo3 apps. Problems are a) the app status area is already crowded so ooo3's icon may get masked by the task switcher and b) the quickstart menu doesn't like to stay open.

I've given up on keeping my N800 tablet in sleep mode since something is draining the battery quite quickly... a fully charged battery is discharged completely within 12 hours when in sleep mode -- maybe it's the AData flash card I use, which reputedly draws extra power. I don't know. Anyway, every restart would mean launching ooo3 anew and that takes well over two minutes the 1st time.

Re Abiword 2.6.6, I have run out of options to try... there's no v2.6.4 available on Ubuntu jaunty... similarly, the v2.6.6 is not available for debian yet, no? I keep thinking that the high cpu usage i am seeing upon loading say a 20-page document is some interaction with the mer environment -- so I'll keep this on the backburner for when a newer version of [easy] mer is available.

Font-mapping is a bit of a headache, I noticed that ooo3 writer was displaying a word doc all in italics... once I switched to one of the configured fonts then things were shown fine... this is one instance in which Abiword did better... but yes, ooo3 writer is capable of importing a much wider set of document formats than Abiword.

On a different track, I installed Gnumeric and it works very well... no problems so far. It works so well that I am considering uninstalling the hildonized version I had previously installed (a 13mb install)... the app itself loads relatively quick, and excel sheets are loaded fast... ooo3's importing of these excel sheets in contrast is agonizingly slow. So at least in this case, having a specialized app such as Gnumeric is a win... Abiword could be in this category if it worked! :-)

--denis