While merging cells of a table, Writer becomes unresponsive or crashes.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
I have a 300+ pages odt file, in which I have used a two-column table to control
the text flow: Its left column acts as margin; and the right column holds the
contents (text, tables, images, etc). We will call this "the outer table" ("OT"
in short) in this discussion.

The document was actually converted from a Word document (I just opened the
"doc" file in Writer and saved it as "odt"). Currently I am working on this odt
file with Writer. 

The original file was made with Word 2000, which used to crash when a single row
of a table exceeds =>2 pages. Therefore I had to make sure that rows do not
cross a page; by dividing the content into smaller rows.

This lead to two problems:
1. I had to leave blank space on many pages when the rows do not fit in a given
page. 
2. When I edited the document, I had to re-adjust the rows across all pages.

So, when I changed over to Writer, I wanted to merge all rows of OT to avoid the
hassle. I started out by merging multiple cells in the left column and then
merging multiple cells in the right column. But Writer crashed often, or became
unresponsive.(it has crashed more than 60 times in the last week). Now I am down
to merging only two cells at a time but the Writer continues to crash.

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DETAILS OF THE PROBLEM:

The exact symptoms are as follows:

1. Crash: 
As soon as I select the cells and click on the "merge" button ion the table
toolbar, Writer vanishes, and the OOo recovery dialog starts.

2. Unresponsive: 
The screen rapidly alternates between "all white" and regular display
(frequency:  about 0.5 seconds). At this time, Writer stops responding to
keyboard/mouse. It does not even allow me to close the document/window by
right-clicking on the task button and selecting the "Close   Alt+F4" menu
option. I have to use the task manager to kill OOo.

Only on two separate occasions I could see something more:
>> Some images jumped across the page and went to the next page, and then jumped
back. This cycle repeated endlessly.
>> I had put some ellipses (using the "Drawing" toolbar) on these images to mark
particular parts of the images. These ellipses were also seen jumping across the
page, but not in sync with the images themselves. (It appeared as if the
ellipses were trying to chase the images and trying to catch up with them!)
	
Probably the same thing happens in other cases too, but since it is not
happening on the current page, I can't see it. (As mentioned earlier, I can't
leave the current page because OOo stops responding to mouse and keyboard.)

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My own impression is that when there is a long table (spread over multiple
pages) in a document, Writer tries to re-arrange the contents over different
pages. Normally this should be over in a single iteration, but somehow this
optimization takes multiple passes, finally resulting into an endless loop.

The situation is compounded because Writer does not have any "highest-priority"
controls that can interrupt this cycle. Each time I have to kill Writer using
Task manager.
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Although the problem occurs very often, some of the cells CAN be merged without
any problem. But I am unable to predict which of the cells will cause a problem.

Anyhow I have identified one specific location in the document that gives this
problem very consistently. It could help troubleshooting.

This file is confidential, so do not post it or share it publicly. 

Sending the file  through email is problematic. I have FTP'd the earlier version
of this file to Lars, so I could send this latest version to him.
Else, please let me know whom to send the file. 

I can provide the recovery report also, but I do not work online; so it will
have to be sent as an email. Please suggest if there is anything else I can do
with this report.

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OTHER INFORMATION:

1. When the problem occurs, the task manager shows that the CPU load is steady,
almost at 50%. 

2. I am working on a 3 GHz Pentium 4 PC with HT, Intel 915GAV motherboard and 1
GB/400 MHz DDR RAM. I do NOT run any other application while using OOo.

3. I have not observed any abnormalities except one: While instaling GIMP, two
of the dlls related to XML parsing were renamed by that installer. I do not know
if this is a factor in this case.