Well, it's a good thing the ghost machine's still running.

'Tis the end of the day at the end of the month, and cause for rejoicing, because it's time to do Accounts Receivable!  Yay!

And so I fire up OpenLibreOffice, currently version 3.4.5 here in Debian-testing-land, opening last month's invoice (in .odt format) for ToasterCo, and save as this month's, in preparation for editing it.

Oops!  "Save as..." makes Baby LibreOffice crycrash.

Hokaaay.  Copy the file to the new name; open; edit; save.  Export as PDF, the better to e-mail it.

Oops!  It crashes immediately upon "Export as PDF."

Also, the last edits - the part where I filled in the numbers - didn't get saved, and didn't print either, when I printed it between saving and trying to export.

So: open it again, type in the numbers again, save again, print again.

Printing is FUBAR.  Looks like it's forgotten what character encoding we use 'round these parts.  The parts of the document that did print right last time are now a mess.  And the numeric fields seem to be filled in, but not with numbers.

So, back to the near-vacant shell of the old workstation.  Open file, export as PDF, no problem.

Now, it looks like "Export as PDF" may have come unb0rked; at least, it gives an options popup instead of a crash.  Eh???

If'n it's going to be all unstable like that, maybe I need to have a -stable virtual machine to do my word-processing on....

And Googling around for answers proved unhelpful; there's a known problem with saving .doc files on filesystems mounted via CIFS, but this is a .odt file and an NFS filesystem.

Update: got it.  I was setting

SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen

to get around the older LibreOffice-exits-immediately problem.  Turns out that's no longer needed, and in fact causes Save as... to fail.  Setting

SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=kde

or just leaving SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN unset solves the new problem, without the old one reappearing.