Open Office and Mandrake 9.0

[Liberty Young]

I'm trying to use the spell checker, and it doesn't seem to work. I have
all the stuff enabled within Tools..Options..Language settings..Writing
Aids, but the spell checker still fails to detect ANY misspelled words.
Frustrating, as Evolution and AbiWord both have working spell checkers. 

Has anybody out there have any suggestions to get OO's spell checker to
work, or has run into the same problem as I have? Does anybody there
with Mandrake 9.0 and OO have a working spell checker?