Comment 107 for bug 185311

Starting /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin directly works for me too, tank you!

A little (constructive) criticism at this point:
Updates which corrupt Ubuntu's basic packages (like Open Office) should never make it from "hardy-proposed" to "hardy-updates". I believe this bug is unnecessary and annoying because it is very obvious and it occurred on every up-to-date AMD64 Hardy so far. It even may scare new users back to Windows. It's simply not acceptable for productive machines that Office won't work for a week or so. I always believed (or hoped) that Canonical had a better quality assurance...