When Updating from LibreOffice 3.5.2 to 3.5.4, I had selected German and English dictionaries, and I installed the German language pack. However LibreOffice Writer is unable or unwilling to spell-check or hyphenate any German text. In linguistic options I cannot select a German module; only English appears. I re-checked the installation: The German dictionary is selected. So I suspect that either the installation is not correct, or the German dictionary is missing something. Independent of that, LibreOffice should produce a warning if continuous spell-checking or automatic hyphenation is activated, but the required linguistic module is missing. Currently you must only find that out by trying to activate the language module in the linguistic options.
Thanks for your bug report. Already reported (and RESOLVED FIXED) as 'Bug 50552 - SPELL check does not mark wrong text and capitalization rules'. The bugfix will be available in v3.5.5. There's a workaround for v3.5.4: → https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50552#c8 . *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 50552 ***
My installation (Windows/XP, just in case it matters) was done as Administrator, but the problem occurred for a different user without administrative rights (a common scenario IMHO). The "bundled" directory for that user had a timestamp file and a database file. While that timestamp file had the date of installation (or first start after installation), the database file seemed untouched.