Hi Doug!
I went down this path, deployed 4.1.11 with all the appropriate pre-requisite RPM package updates....only to find out that 4.1.11 turned out to be abysmally slow openning up any of my spreadsheets, as well as few other documents.
Personally, I think 4.1.11 opens spredsheets (and other things) faster than the older versions. Use Appache OpenOffice Quick Start, with the "-calc" (and others as needed) parameter, in a startup folder, and it will open quickly...
All excellent pointers on what I would have to agee defines the pre-requisites for most optimal setup. I did actually do all of the above (normally my AOO is configured to LH), I do not use the 'Quick Start' functionality, but in this case I gave it a go just to be sure.
In my testing I went through multiple configurations, clean re-boot (to baseline the DLL loads, etc.) and literally noted the timing in both cases: 1) open an existing spreadsheet, 2) open just the app (Calc). 4.1.11 was literally 3x slower in all instances. The weird part was that my CPU meter would show on-going multiple spikes during the load, sort of like what I used to occasinally see with FF after several days of use and massive memory consumption (typically over 1G), but this would occur on a freshly re-booted machine, with literally gobs of free memory available.
Anyways, it'll be 4.1.7 here until the next version is released and I'll give that a go.