Following on from my post, It looks there there is an AMD64 specific bug that breaks spadmin and native printing from OpenOffice.
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8663
If anyone can come up with a more elegant solution than printing to a file and then lpr filename or if there is a way to launch the gnome print dialogue from within OpenOffice then I'd be pleased to hear about it.
Regards Wayne