Holding down SHIFT while moving arrow keys to highlight text is currently broken in openoffice.org-writer-2.0.3-7.4. It instead behaves as if SHIFT is not held at all, by moving the cursor.
Works perfectly fine for me in openoffice.org-writer-2.0.3-7.5, which shouldn't have any significant different to openoffice.org-writer-2.0.3-7.4. Check with gedit as well to make sure
Strange, it works in openoffice.org-writer now after a reboot. I'll reopen if I see this problem again.