It seems that my case mentioned above was different, had nothing to do with gnome and gtk.
With that particular document, Ubuntu's OOo Writer 2.3 was also unable to generate a table of contents. When I did generate the PDF in Sun's OOo 2.3.1 I found that some of the images were floating around erratically. After I fixed all of that, the 2.3 version could generate PDF, table of contents, etc. Apparently my problem was more related to bad layout that got OOo 2.3 into a loop whereas OOo 2.3.1 was able the handle the situation.
It seems that my case mentioned above was different, had nothing to do with gnome and gtk.
With that particular document, Ubuntu's OOo Writer 2.3 was also unable to generate a table of contents. When I did generate the PDF in Sun's OOo 2.3.1 I found that some of the images were floating around erratically. After I fixed all of that, the 2.3 version could generate PDF, table of contents, etc. Apparently my problem was more related to bad layout that got OOo 2.3 into a loop whereas OOo 2.3.1 was able the handle the situation.