Being fairly new to Knoppix maybe I've done something wrong. But I seem the same problems as the original poster.
However I've got a bit more to add:

1. It appears that OpenOffice fails due to a bad /opt link. When OppenOffice failed to run from the desktop, I tried
to run it from the command line and got:

Starting OpenOffice.org.
/usr/bin/checkmem: line 30: /opt/openoffice/program/soffice: No such file or directory

So I took a look and /opt points to:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Sep 14 06:51 opt -> /UNIONFS/opt

I assume that UNIONFS is supposed to be some sort of environment variable. It isn't set on my machine. Looking
around I noticed several other programs don't work as well. I'd be because of the same reason. However I can't
figure out where this thing is supposed to point to. I didn't see any messages at start up that seemed to indicate a
problem with this.

BTW - it rocks that Knoppix can now figure out the wireless network card automatically!

-TM