Well, if you want to stay with fontconfig-2.3.91 you have to run fc-cache -f after installing fonts, as there is some bug in fontconfig. Its symptom is crashing every X application. As far as I know, OpenOffice 2.0 installs some fonts, therefore you should run fc-cache afterwords.
Ahhh... that would explain why everyone is having problems with the latest fontconfig update from apt. Not knowing that you should run fc-cache is a HUGE handicap though. There will be a lot of people with broken GUIs in the next couple of days. :-( Can't this fc-cache -f be included as part of the RPM the same way config is done when you install a kernel RPM? Wonder if the maintainer of fontconfig could add that in? (I don't know enough about how RPMs work to know if this is possible... just asking) C.