Problem description: 

Steps to reproduce:
1. Set the environment variable $DATA to the name of some directory unrelated to LibreOffice
2. Ensure no LibreOffice processes are running
3. Launch LibreOffice (/usr/bin/libreoffice)

Current behavior:
The splash screen shows for a few seconds, then it closes and an error message is printed:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'com::sun::star::uno::RuntimeException'

A process continues to run; "ps -ef" shows "/usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin -splash-pipe=5", but no GUI appears.

If $DATA is not set, the GUI appears normally.

Expected behavior:
The GUI should appear normally.

NOTE: I've seen the same behavior in OpenOffice.

I've downloaded the source code to try to track down the problem.
I haven't completely diagnosed it, but I suspect that the
culprit is the Components::parseXcsXcuIniLayer() function in
configmgr/source/components.cxx :

...
if (ini.getFrom(rtl::OUString(RTL_CONSTASCII_USTRINGPARAM("DATA")), urls))
{
parseFileList(layer + 1, &parseXcuFile, urls, ini, recordAdditions);
}

I also wonder whether some other seemingly innocuous environment
variables might cause similar problems.  Suggestion: add tracing to all calls to getenv() to see just what environment variables it's looking at.

See also my e-mail message at http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/msg13233.html

Platform (if different from the browser): 
              
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.04 Chromium/14.0.835.202 Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1