Pasting a text can clash with spelling and grammar checks without announcing
that the problem has to do with spelling or grammar. The result is a hang or crash.

Specifically: A 47KiB+ text that is binary, compressed, or encrypted (unknown
which) and is pasted from gedit or Firefox into Writer causes, after a moment,
OOo to fail. Menubar menus won't open, paging up or down fails (Page Up may work
once but not Page Down), and the insertion point won't move. The service menu
works and Writer can be moved to another workspace, but only the title bar shows
up there and only alt-F4 is feasible at that point, getting a Force Quit box. If
Calc was already open, Calc goes down with Writer.

But if spelling and grammar checks are turned off before the pasting, Writer is
fine.

The text in question has no space or period, and apparently has no word longer
than 60 characters (defining a word as any string bounded only by a space,
period, beginning of line or file, and end of line or file, although gedit, at
least, includes more boundaries and so has a higher word count, shortening the
average word length in gedit's calculation, and I don't know if that's also true
of Writer).

By contrast, pasting of slightly larger texts composed of apparently human
language, so content has something to do with it, not just length. The two
human-language texts were these, each one repeated for enough lines to exceed
total file size of the crasher text:

Passes a Writer spell-check:
where where where where where where where where where sample

Fails a Writer spell-check:
floccinaucinihilipilification floccinaucinihilipilification fremble

Thus, something about certain kinds of strings causes the problem. For
additional details and for possible access to the problematic text file (if our
diagnosis is wrong the text could be dangerous to data on your computer, which
is why I haven't posted it but it is possibly available), see issue 99029,
including posts of February 13th.

For the kludge, I turned off all options possible in the spelling-grammar
dialog. Thus, I have not tested for whether spell-checking alone or
grammar-checking alone is the problem or if some other combination of checkboxes
within that dialog is the culprit. I also haven't tested shorter texts or tried
typing the bad text by hand. Nor have I tried pasting the full text with
background spell- and grammar-checking on and simply waiting, say, an hour
before attempting to scroll, page, click, or keyboard-menu or anything else to
see if OOo fixes itself. However, in a production environment, like an office,
that's usually unacceptable.

A fix is needed. Perhaps the key is for OOo to intercept a large paste coming
and suspend background spell- and grammar-checking until the paste is done and
then apply background spell- and grammar-checking serially to portions of text
so no hang occurs, perhaps displaying a progress bar.

Thanks.

-- 
Nick