Java has been completely removed on my iMac running Mountain Lion. After removal, when I try to edit a text document save in .doc format, it instantly closes LibreOffice completely.
Is Java required to successfully run LO version 4.0???
Java is required for very few and specific operations. Saving is certainly not one of these. What you are seeing is a crash. I searched bugzilla and found no such bug reported yet.
Could you please be so kind and report it there, so developers can investigate it and fix it. Please provide as much details in your report as possible, so developers can try to reproduce it. Also please see if you can save your file as odt, open it and when saving as doc, does it still crash? If yes, then please attach that odt file as well.
And it would be even more helpful if you could go one step further and see how to get a backtrace:
Reporting bugs
After you have done so you could post link to that bug here in form fdo#123456
Wiki page listing components still written in Java here. The main ones affecting users are likely to be those listed here.