(Summary may be a bit of an over-generalisation but ...) Basically, if I have a word doc "/tmp/Foo" and I do "oowriter /tmp/Foo" then I get a dialog which just says Read-Error Error reading file . [ OK ] If I rename it to /tmp/Foo.doc it works fine. The context here is that Firefox gets confused with some sites (e.g. yahoo mail) and saves attachments like "Tax Assignment.doc" as "Tax" and launches OpenOffice.org. See bug #159849
(This openoffice.org-1.9.104-1 by the way)
Stupid binfilter module's typedetect gets called before writers where there is no suffix hint and it uses clipboard ids to find the filter. Not realizing that there are three filters with the same clipboardid and grabs the first one and announces the word97 document as winword 5. Complete mess but easy to quick hack fix, which will be in 1.9.108-3.