I have recently upgraded (via APT) to Feisty and... after disabling RAID/LVM completely (I only have one disk; in Edgy it failed silently but in Feisty it goes haywire) everything works just fine... except that I can only start OpenOffice.org 2.2 Writer and Calc if I sudo 'em. Strangely enough, Base and Impress starts as my regular user. Any ideas?

What exact errors do you get when you run them as yourself. If typing “oowriter2” in a terminal doesn’t work, how about “/usr/lib/openoffice/program/swriter” (or whatever your system calls it)?

I was able to trace the problem down to SCIM. It somehow dies and brings down Writer and Calc with it. When I start them as root, I get this on the console:
Writer and Calc crash before this if started as a normal user. Impress and Base seem not to use the GTK IM interface. SCIM works perfectly for Qt programs.

[Update] SCIM is not the real culprit. I have disabled it completely, yet Writer and Calc will only run for root. As for errors, I don't get any error messages relative to it - it dumps some text to the console, but it's about some assertions in GTK and is the same both for "myself" and for root. Leads me to believe then that it's something to do with permissions.

Solved. It was a bug in OpenOffice.org. It was fixed in the latest updated packages in the Ubuntu repositories.