I still had the original problem with 633.
The cause is that libodbc.so MUST be located in /usr/lib,
/usr/local/lib does not work! (This is incompatible with
staroffice, I think it should be fixed. I'll look
into that)

I'm using the www.unixodbc.org implementation
which is installed in /usr/local/lib.

I fixed it as root by:

cd /usr/lib
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libodbc.so.1.0.0 libodbc.so

After that action openoffice works OK.