Just to let everyone on the list know,

We found and fixed the StarOffice problem. It turned out to be a libc5
getcwd implementation. Linux has a getcwd systemcall that uses the
directory cache, but before the dcache was introduced applications
basically walked the tree back up to the root, comparing the inode
number of '.' with the directory entries in the parent directory '..'.

A Coda patch that went into 2.4.4 broke this, the inode numbers of
volume mountpoints didn't match the inode numbers of the root of the
mounted volume anymore. This went mostly unnoticed because not many
applications are linked to an old libc5, and the getcwd syscall is so
convenient and efficient that not applications implement their own
userspace variant.

So only a few applications would be affected by this, and only on Linux.
I've sent a fix to Marcelo which hopefully will show up in 2.4.19-pre5.
Once Linus returns from his vacation I'll send a patch against 2.5.7 to
him.

Jan