StarOffice: Slide sorter slow

[Joel Hammer]

Well, with the new patch I can now load my very large
powerpoint presentations into StarOffice, for example: 

-r-xr-xr-x    1 root     root         371M Sep 22 11:40 TumorBoard1.ppt
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         290M Mar 22 05:04 TumorBoard1.sxi

The loading takes several minutes. That's OK. What is
not OK is how slow StarOffice is when manipulating these
images. It takes forever to build the thumbnails for the
slide sorter view, and even after you wait a LONG time
for all the thumbnails to build, moving them around is
still very slow. It seems as if the thumbnails are being
regenerated each time you move the slides.

There are about 40 digital images, each about 1 to 3 megs,
in this presentation. Powerpoint handles this much more
quickly. I use PowerPoint on two other machines, both
better than my linux box in terms of CPU (2 gig Pentium
4 and a 1 gig centrino versus a 1 Gig Duron for the linux
box. The Linux box has plenty of memory, though, even when
running staroffice with  this large file.)

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        645152     592028      53124          0      11500     459800
-/+ buffers/cache:     120728     524424
Swap:      1309280      60776    1248504

This slowness makes StarOffice useless for making slide
presentations.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Is there a cure?

Joel