LibreOffice always shows recovery process at startup due to failing recovery items

Great! I tried to recreate this issue and now I can't remove the failed recovery screen.

The way to fix it is to hit cancel on the recovery screen, instead of trying (and failing) the recovery (source). Works for me.


Hitting Cancel as other posters suggest is not a solution for me because the same dialog keeps being shown every time I close and reopen the application.

Ubuntu 14.04.2 with LibreOffice version 4.2.8.2

The 'simple' solution for me was to do the following:

  1. close any open LibreOffice windows navigate to where LibreOffice stores registrymodifications.xcu
    • for me from a default install it's stored under /.config/libreoffice/4/user
  2. make a backup of registrymodifications.xcu
  3. edit registrymodifications.xcu with text editor (such as gedit)
  4. search for the string RecoveryList
  5. completely remove any item tags containing the path /org.openoffice.Office.Recovery/RecoveryList
    • delete from - will be one line but can appear as several if word wrap is turned on
    • NOTE: Only delete the RecoveryList items that you DO NOT, in fact, want to recover
  6. Save your changes, close the file
  7. Next time you open a LibreOffice file with LibreOffice it won't force you to go through the tedius recovery failure process

NOTE: LibreOffice writes to the registrymodifications.xcu file often while it is running - if you modify the file while LibreOffice is running your changes will be overwritten/ignored

A more robust answer (providing file locations for different operating systems, etc) can be found via this link: Question/Answer from LibreOffice Help site


This problem seems to appear in Ubuntu 12.04.

Of course you can cancel the recovery process but that's not a solution because you will have to do it every time you start LibreOffice, even after having closed all documents properly after the last session.

The bug is caused by the package lo-menubar that offers HUD functionality for LibreOffice.

So the real solution of the problem is sudo apt-get remove lo-menubar.

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Libreoffice

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