I recently encountered a problem with OpenOffice in a non-Linux environment: after about fifteen seconds, even if you didn't do anything at all, it would crash every time.

Of course the problem rendered OpenOffice completely unusable until I finally found out what it was. Happy to try to spare the rest of you the same grief.

Eventually, I found a crash-report that led me to the solution: "checking for automatic updates." This thread would crash and cause an "unhandled exception" which therefore took out the entire application. (The OS said that it had "unexpectedly quit.")

I don't know if this problem does or might occur in Linux, but "if it does, here is the solution." Simply turn that option off in Preferences. Now you know.

I have of course reported the problem, but I don't know which versions of their software might share this bug. (Plus the inability to "graciously catch it.")