So I finished off Jan’s initial gio OpenOffice.org integration work (i.e. issue 88090 as workspace ucpgio1)
The gio api is a far better fit to the OOo worldview than gnome-vfs is and was pretty straightforward to implement modulo my own bafflement as to why I had an error claiming that mounting share named “X” failed as not existing which incredibly had the root cause that the share named “X” was really called “Y”.