Unrecoverable error has occured

[Jdon]

I'm new with Linux. Using Red Hat 8.0. Bought Solveig Haugland, Floyd Jones's book with the CD included for OpenOffice.org 1.0. The installation appeared to go OK however there were no shortcut icons generated for starting the app. Double clicking on "soffice" brings up the opening logo "OpenOffice.org" thereafter an error screen comes up with "Unrecoverable error has occured. All modified files have been saved and can probably be recovered at program restart."

I went through the setup routine and selected repair which went to conclusion, but to no avail on correcting the problem. I looked at the setup.log and it shows mostly normal steps. There are 10 instances of "ERR make shortcut /usr/open_office/program/soffice to /usr/open_office/soffice" with diffierent files in place of soffice. Also 5 instances of "error: registryItemAction:: execute() called"
My platform is an intel pentium 3 with 384megs ram.
Thanks for any suggestions for tracking down the problem.
I don't seem to have much luck with Office products. I gave up on trying to get Wordperfect Office 2000 for Linux to run. I figured OpenOffice would be a peice of cake. Wrong!