I have recently upgraded OpenOffice to v 4.1.1 and re-installed the dictionaries, but the spellchecker marks almost all words in my text documents with a red underline. F7 shows several English language dictionaries installed but changing these has no effect. One answer to a similar problem suggested updating the user profile but there does not seem to be any way of doing this in this version. Any suggestions would help.
It looks to me that Writer doesn’t understand which language you are using. Please have a look at:
Tools > Language > All Text
and see if thereafter the language setting is matching your needs.
Additionally I remember having had once problems with languages in v4.1 therefore upgrading to 4.2 or 4.3 could be a possibility.