I’ve noticed the slowness too, with opening it up, but otherwise I’ve had no problems with it. I love it. And, thanks to the people in this thread that mentioned 2.0. I hadn’t known it was available yet. 
Just tested this - Word opens for me in 4 seconds, compared to OO Writer’s 3. Spreadsheets are equal.
If you depend on everything charecter for charecter, pixel for pixel the same between OO and MSO, then your out of luck. If you just want to be able to interpret previous word documents and you’ve done nothing more complicated than fancy fonts and bulleting, it should be fine.
The main problem with mainstreaming OO (or a lot of open-source software) is that it is written by programmers, often for a small audience. Often, the person who programmed a particular piece of open-source wrote it for himself and then decided to release it. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, except that it often makes for clunkiness, especially in the UI. So, that’s what my major problem with OO was (and why I stuck with a copy of Office Pro 2003 when I got one cheap), at least the older version I was using. Haven’t tried the newest release. Open-source programmers tend to make everything available at once, so once you know what you’re doing, the software is really powerful AND easy to use, but this can make it intimidating to a new user. Microsoft takes the opposite tack–not a whole lot of what is really powerful is initially easily available to the user AND it’s difficult to use because you have to go digging it out and beating all the “computer=toaster” dumbing-down of the software to make it easy on the end user.
OO Users: How’s the support for tables? I use them pretty frequently with the gridlines hidden to lay out my Word documents and would definitely miss it.
I checked the OO web site, but couldn’t find any good details about this. Thanks.
Actually I now see 2.0 is still in beta; 1.1.4 is the current “stable” version. Sorry to mislead.