On my freshly installed Red Hat Linux 7.2 system, I installed openOffice.org
1.0.1.  When trying to look at help text, I see the tree on the left, but of the
text on the right I only see the title, in pale gray, and a dark line running
through the lower half of that text.  The rest of the page is blank, except for
the occasional graphic mark, like a big thumbtack, or sometimes a bunch of very
short rectangles all together like a table where the text is too small,
vertically, to appear.  I'm guessing this is related to the difficulty I had
with the spreadsheet producing microscopically short rows (0.01" high), but that
it is not related to the "don't have spaces in the path name" solution to a
previously "fixed" issue, since I have no spaces in my path names.

Richard.