Saw an odd thing tonight. I had a document open in OpenOffice - I noticed that when I opened an OpenOffice menu the icons in the panel became distorted - became abstracts in red and blue scratches. I could get the panel to go back to normal if I right-mouse clicked on the desktop (calling up the menu).

And once, I noticed that my desktop wallpaper disappeared completely - the screen going completely black behind the OpenOffice window. Same fix: right-mouse click.

Running a Gigabyte GeForce 7600GS (N76G series) AGP w/ 256 MB memory and the nvidia 177 "recommended' driver; dual LCD monitors (a SyncMaster 731n and an hp pavilion f1903)

The latest driver from nvidia is actually 180.22. But, from your other posts, I see that upgrading the drivers is not an option for you at the moment.

That said, I recall openoffice being quite the pain to use in 4.1 (when I had the 177.x drivers. Typical things that would go bonkers on the desktop were plasmoids - especially the clock which would flicker and cause the second hand to leave trails.

I can happily report that in KDE 4.2 + nvidia 180.22 (they both came to Arch at the same time) these glitches are thankfully absent.

Hope this helps.

P. S. Things you could do meanwhile: Get on the horn - go to #kubuntu and find out if they plan to update the drivers in their repos soon. Of course, if you are comfortable with it, consider (shameless plug for favorite distro begins here) reading up on Arch's rolling release model (end of shameless plug for favorite distro).

Try also disabling OpenOffice's KDE Integration, which is yet to be ported to KDE 4. ( Sidenote - don't experience this issue on KDE 4 Trunk, openSUSE 11.1, Intel X3100 )

bcooksley wrote:Try also disabling OpenOffice's KDE Integration, which is yet to be ported to KDE 4. ( Sidenote - don't experience this issue on KDE 4 Trunk, openSUSE 11.1, Intel X3100 )

Not sure how to do this. Is it an option in the OpenOffice system?

It is an option in OpenOffice, however I can't seem to find it at this time. I do recall someone mentioning how to disable OpenOffice Native dialogs somewhere on these forums however.

just remove the package openoffice-org-kde (oo will look like win3.11 ^^)
have you tried the latest ooo3 ?? it works great on kubuntu8.10

Code: Select all

## openoffice
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

karthikp wrote:I can happily report that in KDE 4.2 + nvidia 180.22 (they both came to Arch at the same time) these glitches are thankfully absent.

FWIW, same here with openSUSE 11.1. I was getting awful graphical oddities when running OpenOffice with the 177 drivers. I manually updated to the 180 driver and that sorted it out.

Upgraded to OO 3.x and nvidia 180.22 - so far so.... well.. acceptable. Better than before.

I found on several other boards that the problems with OO 2.X is a known issue.

Never had that problem with both KDE4 and OO.o. Looks like a distro-related problem.

sombragris wrote:Never had that problem with both KDE4 and OO.o. Looks like a distro-related problem.

I don't have any problem with OO.o 3.0 too. Currently running KDE 4.2 using NVidia drivers 180.27.