Just to be clear, what I wrote only pertains to opening office-type documents in Firefox, not in Thunderbird, and it concerns using the OOo browser plugin rather than the external applications.
If you do want to use the plugin, you could check what plugins Firefox knows. You can do this by typing "about:plugins" into the Firefox address bar (no quotes needed). This should open up a report in Firefox that lists all your browser plugins. You should see an entry like this:
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OpenOffice.org Plug-in
File name: libnpsoplugin.so
OpenOffice.org Plug-in handles all its documents
It will be followed by a listing of all the file types the plugin recognizes.
If that checks out OK, then I think what you need to do is to reset the file associations you set in Firefox, the ones that look for the external OOo application (swriter) rather than using the plugin. There are several ways to do this, so I'll refer you to a Mozillazine article that has a good explanation for the different versions of Firefox:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/File_types_an ... ad_actionsBut all of that is for using the plugin, which is different than using the external application. If you're fine with using the external application, and if Hagar's suggestion doesn't work, then it still might be a good idea to try resetting the file associations as described above. And it might be a good idea to disable the plugin in the OOo Options, too.
If your problem has been solved, please edit this thread's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line. Thanks!
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About Ubuntu LinuxZotero, for research and bibliography management with OOo.
OOo 2.4.X on Ubuntu 8.x + None needed :)