serious Openoffice-1.1.3-swriter hang

[Jeffrey Williams]

Normally I would take this to the openoffice support forum, the problem 
is unusual enough that I thought you guys might want to know.  I could 
not find any mentions of a similar problem anywhere else.  The problem 
is severe, but has only occurred twice and is not consistent repeatable.

I am running FreeBSD 5.3, Xorg-6.7.0, fluxbox-0.1.14_2, and 
jdk-1.4.2p6_7.  I installed Openoffice-1.1.3_1 from the port.

When I started "openoffice-1.1.3-swriter", the splash screen appears 
fine, when the window title bar and frame appears with out contents, and 
  hangs.  At this point, the second time it happened I waited for about 
half an hour with no change.  In both cases it was when I tried to kill 
the process that the fun really began.

The following are the processes that appear in the "ps -waux" listing:

user   xxxx1  0.0  0.4  1672  972  ??  Is    9:42PM   0:00.01 /bin/sh -c 
  openoffice-1.1.3-swriter
user   xxxx2  0.0  0.4  1672 1000  ??  I     9:42PM   0:00.01 /bin/sh 
/usr/local/bin/openoffice-1.1.3-swriter
user   xxxx6  0.0 22.6 98072 58268  ??  S     9:42PM   0:08.81 
/usr/local/OpenOffice.org1.1.3/program/soffice.bin -writer

Now normally when killing a hung program, will start with the last 
process created and work my way backwards until the whole thing is gone. 
  However when I tried that this time, the third process could not be 
killed, even with signal 9.  So tried kill the other two, they died just 
fine, the third would still not die.  So I tried shutting down X, which 
shutdown fine, but still left "soffice.bin -writer" still running, I 
tried the killing with signal 9 again, again nothing happened.  At this 
the first time, I tried "shutdown -r now", the only unusual message (and 
this if from memory so forgive me if it is not exact) was at the point 
where the system drops into single user mode, it was:
"some processes would not stop, ps axl notified"
at which point it goes on clearing buffers and syncing the disks, the 
disk sync completes, there is a message about no buffers in use, at 
which point it hangs, and will not complete the shutdown.
The second time openoffice writer hung, instead of trying to shutdown 
and reboot all at once, I used "shutdown now" to drop into single user 
mode. In single user mode using "ps -waux" the "soffice.bin -writer" 
process was still showing up, I tried one more time to kill it, and 
still it would not die.  At this point I tried to complete the shutdown 
with "halt", as the first the shutdown hung immediately upon completing 
the disk sync.
At this stage in both instances when the shutdown was hung, I tried 
turning the computer off with the power button on the front (soft power 
button) in both cases it would not shut off the computer.  I got a acpi 
error message saying that the button was ignored because the computer 
wasn't ready. In both cases I then resorted to the hard power switch 
located on the power supply in the back of the case.

As I said this problem has only occurred twice but was significant 
enough I thought you would want to know.  It has also only occurred with 
writer, I have also used calc fairly often with out issue.  I have not 
used any other applications significantly yet.

As near as I can remember, in both instances at the time the problem 
occurred I was also running thunderbird-1.0rc and Mozilla 1.7.3 at the 
same time.  Also I don't know if it would be related but OO has been 
core dumping whenever I try to print a MS Word doc, however it usually 
works fine if I save the doc in an openoffice format, and re-open it, 
and then print.  That last is repeatable, and if you want I get you a 
copy of the core.

Feel free to e-mail me, if you have any other questions.

Jeffrey Williams
jeff at sailorfej.net