Well I finally got sick of my new open office documents being very naughty little buggars when created in windows explorer through Windows 7.

Basically, the problem was that if I wanted a default language for my new files and I wanted to make them through the windows explorer context menu, the 'default' that openoffice uses does not apply. I went around and saw this same issue as 'solved' in open office help, and it involved creating your ideal default template and saving it as "Soffice.odt" to documents and settings/all users/templates.

All well and good, but Windows 7 was quite uninterested in my machinations. Any attempts to view or access documents and settings resulted in a denial of access, even as administrator. "For Vista, go to Users/All Users/Templates, simple!" they say! Sadly, that too is inaccessible in Windows 7.

For anyone who uses OpenOffice, or if not just so that I have a note here of what I did...this solution finally worked, make the language-set blank document, save it as Soffice.odt. Go into windows safe mode (command prompt) then use the good old 'copy' command to copy Soffice.odt from the place you saved it to "users/all users/templates". It should ask you to overwrite but, while in safe mode, NOT deny you access. The big trick here is that if you go to users/all users/templates then it will show no files. When you try to copy it however it will ask yo overwrite. Say yes and it SHOULD, rather than giving access denied if this is done from regular windows 'cmd', indicate that one file was overwritten. Did that, and I was back to normal operations in open office. Sadly this was my third attempt at solving this problem, and this time I got stubborn about it.

That meant I lost three hours trying to fix the silly problem just to create a secondary notes file for my current work. BUT, at least it's done!