I've been using OOo v2.3.1 on a new Mac running Leopard. Startup is slow (as is performance
generally, compared to MS Office) and always gives an error message. For no apparent reason,
it starts up a bash prompt. And the X11 interface is relatively clunky and ugly.
But it does work.
Then I recently downloaded OOo_2.4.0RC3_MacOSXIntel_install.dmg (I think from
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/OtherDownload....) and it works great. Startup is
faster, look-n-feel is better. Unlike the official release of 2.4.0, which behaves just like
2.3.1.
I suspect that the RC3 I have is a native (non-X11) build, although the official native
snapshot build DEV300_m2 works very poorly for me.
In short, I recommend going to http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/
and downloading the latest RC. For whatever reason, my experience with these builds has been
much better than with the offical releases.