speeding up OpenOffice?

[Seth Gordon]

My wife routinely curses OpenOffice, because of the time it takes to
load and the way it brings the rest of her system to a screeching halt.
 (This is an Inspiron 1100 with a 2.4GHz Celeron and 256 MB of RAM
running Ubuntu "Dapper Drake".)  Is there some trick, some
--disable-cruft option that I can set when recompiling the whole thing,
that would make the experience less painful for her?  Is there a
lighter-weight word processor that is good at reading and writing the MS
Word files that the rest of the universe insists on sending to her?  (In
practice, she's only using that part of OO; I already installed gnumeric
so she doesn't have to deal with the OpenOffice spreadsheet program.)

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