PLEASE NOTE THAT THE FOLLOWING AFFECTS BOTH THE WORD PROCESSOR AS WELL AS THE SPREADSHEET COMPONENTS AND NOT ONLY THE LATTER ONE

Problem description:
====================
I have been operating an installation of approximately 150+ pc's having OpenOffice/LibreOffice deployed via active directory group policy. Recently, I made a large switch to LibreOffice 3.4.3. Ever since I have been receiving tons of complains for slow loading times, from former Oo users. The Oo version that was installed was 3.3.

Checking things out I can see that the Libreoffice installation is mammoth: ~1Gb on disk. Of course this might not have anything to do with the startup times. OTOH though:

* watching event viewer I can see it takes more than 10" for the Libreoffice splash screen to appear. This happens after soffice.bin has allocated memory in the region of 120-140Mbytes... The application finally opens after some more 10-15". At that time LibO consumes around 120Mb of RAM. Note that my PCs mostly have 512Mb of RAM (Windows XP 32-bit clients, with the Panda AV bloat). And yes, I know that is not much, however we are running a very tight budget here.
* we did not have the same behavior with Oo 3.3

Some tests:
a) Blank worksheet document:
122Mb RAM used by LibO (3.4.3 final) and 110 by Oo (3.3)
b) A two worksheet small (~57Kbyte) Excel file: 186Mbyte used by LibO compared to 106 used by Oo! Obviously here the system starves for system RAM and swaps much faster compared to Oo.

To reproduce:
=============
1) Fire up a loaded 512Mbyte RAM machine (or a VM) running Windows XP 32-bit and an AV 

2) Disable quickstarter for both Oo and LibO (to avoid memory getting wasted in a 512Mb system)

3) Use a simple document/worksheet to compare memory utilization for these two software packages and their difference.

I was under the impression that LibO (3.3) had undergone some serious optimization/cleaning that I'd expect would produce a smaller memory footprint. Not a larger one and definitely not that bigger.