I have Googled this issue and I have several hits with this issue - seems to be with multiple file types.
I have LO 3.5.6.2 on Fedora 17 and I have opened this powerpoint file prior to it being this large - modifications outside of LO have increased the size.
http://archlinux.2023198.n4.nabble.com/Libreoffice-Impress-3-5-6-1-problems-opening-ppt-td4660148.html
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=36412
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=56151
I have a presentation to an important audience tomorrow and I was about to review the Microsoft Powerpoint document in LO because I liked how I was able to view the document over 2 screens - presentation in one and speaker notes in anther when I was prompted to select ASCII font type for filter. I have retried this 4 times with other versions of my document without success.
I have VMWare and I ran up WinXP, with a shared drive, and I can open the file just fine. I exported the file to .pptx, without any change in the LO - still prompting me for acsii filter.
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 nojar nojar 6928384 Aug 20 13:20 ETSTC_TDI7-ao.ppt
-rw-rw-r–. 1 nojar nojar 5964980 Aug 20 13:25 ETSTC_TDI7-ao.ppt.zip
-rw-rw-r–. 1 nojar nojar 8513730 Aug 21 11:01 ETSTC_TDI7_nho2.ppt.zip
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 nojar nojar 244224 Aug 23 19:55 TDI_Development.vsd
-rw-rw-r–. 1 nojar nojar 6985756 Aug 24 18:49 ETSTC_TDI7_nho3.ppt.zip
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 nojar nojar 9142784 Sep 17 23:28 ETSTC_TDI7d.ppt
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 nojar nojar 6866944 Sep 17 23:29 ETSTC_TDI7e.ppt
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 nojar nojar 165 Sep 18 00:01 ~$ETSTC_TDI7e.pptx
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 nojar nojar 6715355 Sep 18 00:01 ETSTC_TDI7e.pptx
I have renamed the file ETSTC_TD7d and recovered a ziped version as ETSTC_TDI7e. Using the MS Powerpoint application I saved it as a .pptx but I am still not able to open the document wit LO
I can open an 800KB .ppt with this version of LO, but not the larger file - I saw a person make a statement regarding upper bound on file size, but that was for *.xls files