OpenOffice is Java?!? Man am I glad I havn't bothered checking it out yet.
It's not. It supports some java-based plugins, but the core program itself it not written in java, IIRC it's some flavor of C.
However, since it can run java plugins to open office, it has some kind of javaVM stuff in there. Most people will never use this, and disabling the 'java' under the Options altogether will speed up the launch time of OpenOffice 2 tremendously.
I use OpenOffice exclusively on my home computer, and haven't missed MS Office for half a second.