I just followed these instructions (on my 8.10 machine) and it installed
without any oddities.

Only difference is you appear to have a space between "openoffice.org-"
and "base"

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org- base

See if cutting the space out makes any difference.

I can't connect to my .mdb files, though, that would be a really useful
thing if there's a way of doing that as you suggest.