hey jholder.. long time no see
i figured out what it was.. i had openoffice 2.3 and apparently when you have openoffice 2.3 and you try open zdesoktop beta 2.. they had issues sharing the java resources on my machine (even thou i have over 2GBs ram.)
But i believe it was due to a bug in openoffice 2.3.. fixed it by installing openoffice 2.4 which doesnt have the bug