Hehe, Shinju, I wish I woulda known your d/l location before I downloaded it from their servers yesterday. Took me for-freakin-ever.
I've been playing with this stuff... Word was primarily the only Office component I ever use with any regularity, and I can already notice that "OpenOffice Writer" seems to take a lot longer to open than Word does. The program doesn't seem all that stable either, as just writing one research paper today somehow caused two crashes. Its auto-save/restoration thing does work a good bit better than Word's though: it seems to catch itself right before it crashes long enough to save your work at that particular moment, unlike Word's which only saves every 5 or so minutes. But if it can catch itself long enough to do that, I wonder why it can't just avoid the crash altogether.
I'll try to play with the other programs too and let you all know how they compare to their Office counterparts, if anyone's interested.
---Jamin
