One thing that bothers me about OpenOffice is it seems to take a long time to launch (not as bad Adobe Acrobat). Try these simple tweaks from an article (How to make OpenOffice run faster) I found on the CybertNet Forum. You should see a significant reduction in the start time. A couple notes:

1. These directions were written for the Ubuntu version but work just as well with Win XP and Vista (some default settings may differ in Win32 versions).
2. Most of us on the forum did not bother enabling the pre-loader but still saw a nice increase in the launch speed.