First, I had trouble with combining myconf and home. When I went to just home, it seems to work ok. I also found one peculiarity with home. You can change the size on your device allocated to the knoppix image, knoppix.img. I tried the whole partition, and then 200M. (it's a 256M Memorex TravelDrive) I could only get it working with the default of 100M. I haven't found a need for myconf once I started using home. I haven't been using screen or the sync cheats myself, so I don't know if they're preserved.

Now about Open Office, why don't you boot knoppix from the cd with no options, then fire up OO. If it's successful, then you may have done something with your configuration. You didn't install knoppix on your hard drive, did you? I can't imagine any changes to KDE that would muck up Open Office.