1) I pulled the pre-req DLL package (AOO-4110-GA-rpm.wpi), extracted the DLLs and tossed them into my \usr\dll location (where I keep these)
That was your first mistake. Either do it with RPM/YUM, or let WarpIn do it. You likely have duplicate DLLs, at different levels.
2) rebooted, ran checkini, general clean-up type stuff, old OO3.2 is now gone
I didn't do that, and it is possible that that is what is causing part of my problems. I hope to get around to cleaning that up, today.
3) left my WPS Integration pieces in place
Uhmmm. Why? AOO4 has it's own (which may be the same program), which doesn't replace the old ones anyway. Of course., since you uninstalled the old OO3.2, the old ones probably point nowhere.
Associations, Base, RPMdlls (this left me scratching my head since it's a separate pre-req package that I manually installed prior to the main install, see Step#1 above), now I basically have duplicates of all these DLLs,
You should have either removed the RPM package from the same directory that the installer was in, or, you should have deselected it. WarpIn has no good way to know that you installed that stuff in a different, undocumented, and I will also say "incorrect", way. Now you definitely have a mess to clean up, although simply using WarpIn to uninstall the RPM package will probably fix the problem. You are now exposed to the problem of which DLL gets loaded first, and that can cause the problem where "sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't".
5) enabled the DLL high-mem load for CODE only
Ah!, but since you have duplicate DLLs, which ones got modified? I suspect that it is only the ones that got installed by WarpIn, but it could be just the first ones that it found, depending on how it looks for them (don't forget about the ".;" entry in LibPath). I gave loading high a quick try, and it crashed, but I think the problem is caused by stray DLLs that don't match. At least there is an easy backout. My plan now, is to clean up the DLL mess, get it working without loading high, then try it again.
I am pretty sure that I am seeing much the same problems, since I already had some of those DLLs installed in other ways (in \eCS\DLL). The RPM WPI package also installs some system DLLs in the AOO4 directory structure (z.dll, for sure), creating the duplicate DLL problem. This could affect other programs too.