Since yesterday's post, I've downloaded the demo versions of StarOffice 8 for Windows & Linux. First up I tried Windows (since I do my important stuff under Linux, so I have to be more cautious there).
First impressions are good! Opening various legacy StarOffice 7 and MS Office documents, all looked fine, none of the font problems that the beta version had. The delay in releasing StarOffice 8 looks to have been put to good use.