At least on Ubuntu OpenOffice versions prior to Openoffice 2 were hopelessly broken when built as a 64bit package anyway.
There were some fixes that Ubuntu (and maybe Debian) managed to get in with varying degrees of success. Mostly printing issues (prints would vanish into a black hole and spadmin would crash before you could do anything with it)
I used to have to resort to printing to a file and then lpr'ing that to the printer manually.