Hi. From MS-Word, there are certain graphics that one can create that feature linked boxes of text (I think they're referred to as smart graphics, or something). There's another MS program called visio that also creates these type of graphics. When I tried to open a docx file that had one of these graphics in it with openoffice.org (I'm using version 3.1 from debian backports on my lenny system), it was unable to read it. Is there a plugin or filter that I can add to openoffice.org to give it this functionality? If not, is there another program that reads these files?

After searching, it seems that there is no such thing. Neither oodraw, nor dia, nor kivio can open vsd files (visio files). vxd files, the xml format of visio, can apparently be opened by dia, however.

Yeah, Visio's native files are completely closed. Like you, I've never found anything besides Visio that can read them.

Not OpenOffice, but LibreOffice, its successor can open ALL Visio files LibreOffice Visio Import Filter: 20 years of drawings opened in your favourite office suite