I installed Ubuntu recently and all generally went well except the menu bar tags in various applications like OpenOffice are blank. The bar itself has blanks(__) where 'File' and 'Edit', etc, would otherwise be. If I click on the blank, the drop down menu shows the various icons with the names blanked after it...makes it really difficult to work with unless you've memorized all of the icons. I suspect some software library was not installed or improperly installed originally on the Ubuntu install but I don't know what it would be. Any ideas??

launch the application from shell prompt and check what errors it is giving....

Launched Openoffice from bash...no errors indicated.