I think my problem may be a different one after looking into it. However this snippet from http://ooo.ximian.com/hackers-guide.html may be relevant: 6.10 It always crashes in sal_XErrorHdl You are a victim of asynchronous X error reporting; export SAL_SYNCHRONIZE=1 will make all the X traffic synchronous, and report the error by the method that caused it, it'll also make OO.o far slower, and the timing different.