OpenOffice refuses to start with: "The application cannot be started. An internal error occured"

The above error occured after I upgraded my Linux OS to a new patchset. No idea if this was really the cause of the error. Unfortunately, the pop up box displaying the error message does not give any indication what to do or how to solve it. Reinstalling OpenOffice didn't help in any way.
Looking in my home folder with ls -altr, I saw a file called .xsession-errors. Besides a couple of other warnings and errors, it shows:

[Java framework] Error in function createSettingsDocument (elements.cxx).
javaldx failed!

Invoking openopffice from the command line with

openoffice4

revealed the same error message.

The simple cause of the problem was that I had a folder called ".openoffice" in my user home-directory which was owned by "root" user (for whatever reaseon).

After changing the ownership back to my user,

 chown -R myuser:mygroup .openoffice

everything continued to work