Complete comments in

 - http://launchpad.net/bugs/46594
 - http://launchpad.net/bugs/52902

I had some files lost in OpenOffice for whatever reason. Upon restarting
OpenOffice it tries, and fails, to recover them. That's fine, I understand it
can't always recover the files.

But it tries to recover them every single time I start OpenOffice, and there is
no apparent way to tell it to stop trying. (I've come to grips with the fact
that those files are gone - I simply don't want to go through the failed
recovery process every time I start OpenOffice).



This is easily reproduced with the following procedure:

1. Create a new document, /tmp/test.odt
2. killall -9 soffice.bin
3. rm /tmp/test.odt
4. ooffice
5. ooffice

If I am simply viewing an OpenOffice.org document, and make no modifications to
it, then OpenOffice.org (or the system) crashes, on the next startup it attempts
to "recover" the file. However, there is nothing to recover; the copy on disk is
perfectly intact.



I think there is a usability bug here, yes. It does not do as many users expect.

The most common case here, described in my earlier comment, is one where the
user has clicked on a link in their web browser, opened the resulting document
in OpenOffice.org, and then logged out and shut down with it still running. This
results in a recovery dialog the next time they start openoffice (again,
regardless of whether they even edited the document), which cannot possibly succeed.

The other issue is that the dialog itself is confusing. The user is given two
options: "Start recovery" and "Cancel". If recovery fails, "Start recovery"
becomes "Finish" (and is cancel disabled?).

It would be a great improvement to change the buttons to explain what action
will be taken. For example:

before recovery attempt: "Recover" and "Discard"
then after recovery attempt: "Try again later" and "Discard"

or something along those lines.