variant dist. with 1.6

I was also noting a difficulty with OOo 3.1/3.2 as it obtains when running from PA1.6. You rightly note, the problem is not PortableApps. On the other hand, OOo is bundled with PA, which implies a certain approbation.

Now, this may be like teaching granny to suck eggs, but: Flash drives connecting through USB ports are relatively slow. While performance varies dramatically by brand, the general rule of thumb is, best flash drive performance is half that of current hard drives (you can check this with a simple online query). Add to this the speed constrictions of USB (not vast, but not trivial, either) and one begins to appreciate just what PA achieves, both as an environment itself and as a supplier of optimized portable applications. But: Fat, unwieldy applications must inevitably present problems.

Far too many programmers (I speak from having had to hire them, then constrain them to do the job) get caught up in the neat-hack syndrome. This has recently been affecting community-based software to an alarming degree. E. g., the latest Tbird adds tabs — about as useless as teats on a bull. The latest Firefox loads far more slowly than its predecessors, and far more slowly than, e. g., Chrome — and its "neat hacks" appear to result in compatibility problems with admittedly rather staid, but to some of us essential, business application software.

OOo is not an exception to this. In a desktop or notebook environment, running from a speedy hard disk, and so on, this is a relatively trivial issue. Running from a flash key it most certainly is not — however welcome an extra cup of coffee, while waiting for things to load, may be. If you cannot understand this, I can only assume you have not had serious corporate computing responsibility. [Please, spare me your resumé, I'm not presently hiring.]

I found, in my own use, the earlier version, cloned easily from a earlier setup and kept as a live backup, loaded faster, and called data files faster and more accurately. Others with whom I have had this discussion concur in my experience anent desktop performance, and when shown the two variants using PA, agreed it could be a problem. People do talk tech, you know....

Tweaks are nice; they take time to find, implement. Some of us are engaged in a wider range of activity and lack the leisure to pursue this; we like stuff to work right out of the box. When one has to go searching, one does this effectively and efficiently. In this case, that meant reversion to a known-functioning version of the software.

[But it is nice to know that there is a class of folks who have nothing better to do than tweak software that shouldn't need tweaking.]

Finally, I am sorry that your education was defective in world-lit; undoubtedly your time was spent grinding out code and documenting tweaks; how very sad. The reference is to a very famous line in a play by Goethe, which led to a fairly common German expression, "Leck mich im arsch." Mozart's treatment (cf: http://www.goear.com/listen/e758712/leck-mich-im-arsch-mozart) is perhaps the most æsthetically appealing.