Hi,

My wife was working on her thesis, and apparently "saved" some images in it from
the web (she thought she saved the actual images, which might be a UI issue in
and of itself, but we'll chalk it up to not knowing the program that well).

This morning, when she went to open the document, it hung (causing general panic
and marital strife, as she had already managed to corrupt the file yesterday,
making Linux, OO, and the world of computer very unpopular in the household!).

Thanks to the prompt suggestions of some people on the OO channel in IRC, and
some straceing on my part, I noticed that it was hung on a connect system call,
to port 80 on some site.

So, basically the problem is this: if there is a server that goes stale, opening
a document "hangs" until things time out.  Since that might take 5 or 10
minutes, your average user is just going to surmise that things have gone to
hell and that they can no longer open their document.

I think what ought to happen is that it attempts to open any linked bits and
pieces in a separate thread, or in some other non-blocking way.

I am not including the actual document, I think that to replicate it, all you
have to do is create a document that links to a site that "takes too long to
respond" (not something that simply doesn't exist).  It shouldn't be too hard to
do that with a tweaked local server.