Created attachment 80617 [details]
Used page format settings

Hard & Software environment: 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo, iMac, 4GB RAM, OS X 10.7.5


User Scenario:

A user work on a particularly long Writer document and has a Calc document open, too. When changing the page margins the values for the left and right margin are (accidentally or not) set in way way that only few characters fit on a line (and therefore on a page).

In this particular case:

* Document info: I used the text of James Joyce's 'Ulysses', without line or page breaks, copied into a single document several times (7-10 times should do).
* Font: Times New Roman 28pt
* Page format: A4, land scape (so width is 21 cm
* Right margin: 10cm
* Left margin: 10.5 cm (see attached screen shot)


Actual Behaviour:

* Writer renders pages to a very long time (I waited more than 3 hours…)
* OpenOffice is displayed as 'unresponsive' in the Mac's activity monitor (see screenshot)
* Calc can't be used anymore, a 'beach ball' mouse pointer is displayed, when hovering the mouse cursor over the program's window


Expected behaviour:

* If an operation takes very long the user should be informed and ideally given the possibility to cancel that operation (some estimation about how long the operation will take might be helpful in deciding whether or not to wait).
* More importantly, other programs of the same suite should not be affected when one program stalls.


Note: 
It's understandable that rendering a long text takes time, but it seems that other programs (Calc in this case) are also affected.