Orca Sluggishness of under Ubuntu EdgyEfT

[Hermann <steppenwolf2 onlinehome de>]

Hi to all,
I'm new in this list, my name is Hermann and I live in Germany.
Recently I've installed Ubuntu 6.10 on my machine, 1 Ghz processor, 256
MB RAM (minus 16 MB for the on-board graphic card) and a swap
partition of 2 GB.
Orca (or is it Ubuntu?) acts very sluggish in general. Starting an
application, mainly OpenOffice, can last minutes; but also other
actions take a lot of time.
The simple question is why?
I heard from some people using similar machines that they don't
experience this problem.
Any ideas what I can do?
Regards
Hermann