To reproduce:
1. Open OOo Writer.
2. Close the file.
3. The Welcome to OpenOffice.org dialog appears.
4. Do not use a menu.
5. In the middle of the dialog, click one of alt-d, alt-s, alp-p, alt-r, alt-o,
alt-m, or alt-n. (I don't have Base installed, so alt-a is disabled.)

What I get:
No response.

What I expect:
The same effect as when I click the adjacent icon (tested with Text Document and
Spreadsheet) or select from the File menu (often used for a text document).

Other information:

I use OOo 3.0.0 OOO300m9 (Build 9358) with Fedora 10 Linux. I don't plan to
upgrade now, since it's stable and upgrading takes time.

All menus open to alt-f, alt-e, alt-v, alt-t, alt-w, alt-h, and alt-spacebar.
Also, ctrl-n and ctrl-o (and probably other ctrl-key combinations) work.

Opening a menubar or window menu, typing esc to close the menu, and typing esc
again to deselect the menu title results in the Text Document icon, in the
middle of the dialog, getting a heavier border and alt-d or alt-s working.
Closing the resulting window, however, leaves the middle-of-dialog alt keys
nonfunctional again.

As OOo's market share penetrates large institutions with ordinary nontech users,
the speed typists among them will expect this to work, especially as it's the
first thing they see when OOo starts up.

Thank you.

-- 
Nick