Comment 59 for bug 857041

I had the same problem with writer. I tried all the suggestions above and none worked.

I did some digging around and in '~/.openoffice.org/3/user' found the file 'registrymodifications.xcu'. Looking inside it, it seemed to contains the name of the document I was editing etc.

So I renamed it to 'registrymodifications.xcu.old' and restarted writer. Now I can enable and disable the display of invisible characters.

I hope someone finds this useful!