Robin Miller wrote a great little article on removing the splash screen that appears while OpenOffice (and StarOffice) loads. This is something that has frequently annoyed me, since it takes up the majority of the screen and cannot be pushed to the background, preventing you from doing any other work while waiting.
Read the full article below for all the details, but the short answer is to edit your global sofficerc file in Linux (soffice.ini in Windows), and change "Logo=1" to "Logo=0" in the [Bootstrap] section.
Thanks for the tip!
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