OOO / VNC is very slow

"The problem sounds like the frequent redrawing of the OpenOffice window. Since OpenOffice's layout has a lot of components (and uses a fair bit of memory), every time you type a letter the screen has to be redrawn over the connection to update the image so you can see what you've typed. You can improve things by turning on a feature called bitmap caching, although I'm not sure if VNC has this. What it essentially does is save parts of the remote screen to the local computer, so every time something must be redrawn, it can just do a small area instead of the whole screen:

I know the Windows RDP client has this option so check out VNC's advanced settings, turning off menu and window animations will also help."