OS: SuSE 9.2 Professional
Kernel: 2.6.8-24.10-default
Software: OpenOffice.org 1.1.3-16 (from the distro)

Description of the problem:
Selecting "Save" and "Save As..." hangs OpenOffice.org, both as regular user and root. Have to "kill" the process (losing any work).

My solution:
Uninstall all of OpenOffice.org, using YaST. Download the OpenOffice archive from the OpenOffice.org download page and install it following their instructions. No more hangs. (Newer version, too.)

What I think was going on:
Probably something to do with the KDE extensions. The process list ("ps -A") showed a defunct process having to do with the KDE init-file-something-or-other (obviously I should have written it down). One of these days I'll test that theory by installing OpenOffice.org but leaving out the KDE extensions package.

SuSE probably has KDE integrated OOo in 9.2. There was a news some time ago, that there is a version of OOo with KDE menus, and dialog boxes and I tried it out.

KDE integrated OOo was pretty neat and looked great in KDE. The opening of save, open etc. dialogues was horribly slow though. I dumped it.