About KWord
(I'd post a comment to Anders' blog, only his blogging software doesn't allow me to login. I believe it's a known problem with Drupal -- I never can login on www.kdedevelopers.org either.)
It's true -- the tables implementation in KWord is completely and fundamentally broken. There are other bits of fundamental brokenness in KWord, too. Little bits of the frames and text engine implementation.
Invite Thomas Zander for dinner and a beer, and you'll learn all about it. Bad, I know. Good news is, it's certainly fixable. The bad news is, nobody currently has the time to do that. Fixing the table implementation is a job that would take a few weeks or a month of connected hacking time. There's only so much that can be done in the wee hours between putting the kids to bed and turning oneself in for the eight hours that are so essential to keep the bloom of youth on ones face.
On the other hand, when I had the occasion to write a couple of big, complex KWord documents the other week, KWord did crash about four times a day when writing the first document. About six bug reports later, I had apparently provoked David too much. The next day, most crashes were fixed and the second document didn't pose any problems.
Except when trying to load a KWord OpenDocument document into OpenOffice: there I ran into an infamous OpenOffice bug: OpenOffice cannot load OpenDocument bulleted lists. Yes, that's an OpenOffice problem, not a KWord problem. See this bug: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=52127. In short: when OpenDocument doc exchange between KOffice and OpenOffice fails, don't blithely assume it's our fault -- it may be the big guys' fault, too.
Although there's plenty to do for us, too.
And in, fact, there's plenty being done. The next KOffice release, 1.4.2, which I hope to finally create tomorrow, will include a lot of OpenDocument fixes, and the 1.5.0 release, slated for end of January, which was going to be just a Krita and Kexi feature release, is going to include even more OpenDocument fixes. In fact, for many KOffice applications, it's going to be the native file format with 1.5.0.
But all that doesn't help with our poor table feature...