If you are one of the few unfortunate blokes that’s pulling your hair out over random File Menu popups on OpenOffice — Word or Spreadsheet — and have been hitting your head against a brick wall trying to find the solution, I hear you.

I intially thought there was some interaction with Skype, but now I have to retract that statement. In all honesty, I have no clue what the problem is.

But I decided to just watch the “random” File Menu problem and time it. And now I am more confused than ever.

On my computer running 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic), I noticed that the File Menu toggles twice a second when OpenOffice has the focus. One toggle event happens precisely on the 11th second; the other toggle event happens around 35th to the 45th second. The second toggle seems to be related to when I launch OpenOffice; the first is always precisely on the 11th second.

And this is something peculiar to OpenOffice; I have not observed this problem with any other program.

And the problem did go away for a while, but came back. I have no explanation for that, either.

But the precise timing of this bug may have something to do with an internal timer within OpenOffice, but I am just guessing at this point. I strongly suspect at this point it’s completely an OpenOffice problem, i.e. no interaction with anything else.

This weirdness was observed on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) 64-bit, OpenOffice 3.1.1. Please drop a line here if you observe this bizarre behavior. Give your timings if you can; may lend more insight as to the nature of this problem.