As I understand it, Alfresco used to start OpenOffice with a bash script (start_oo.sh), but in recent releases there is no such file. So how is OpenOffice started now? I just installed CE 3.2r2 and during the first couple of restarts OpenOffice was started alright, but now, all of a sudden, it isn't started along with Alfresco. Where is this controlled?
In tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco-global.properties set the option ooo.exe=/usr/bin/soffice (the above is what I use on my ubuntu machine, may be a different path for you)
Then it should just work.
One important thing is that if you set the path to something like /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin it actually spawns two processes, and the child process isn't stopped when you stop tomcat.