Ubuntu :: OpenOffice Base Navigation And Display Very Slow

I have set up an OpenOffice (3.2) Base database - tables, mainly, and a few queries. The main table contains about 9000 rows and around 50 fields and there is a second table of 1900 rows and 20 fields and a few other tables with either fewer rows or many fewer fields. The primary key on the main table is a single text field. The .odb file is 4.4Mb. There are no Forms or Reports; the idea at the moment is that I enter data using OO's Table data view. I see that I have an embedded HSQL database and I cannot change dit>Database>Properties because it is greyed out.

Opening the database is reasonably quick (about 5 sec) but then when I want to look at any but the smallest of tables (in data Table view) it is very slow (15 sec on the main table) to display the first group of rows. When I want to move to show a different record it takes just as long to display the new set of rows. It makes no difference whether the new set of records is adjacent (in terms of record order) or a long way off. I need to speed this up x3 or more or I will have to abandon Base as impractical to use.

On the OO Forum some posts talk of separating the database from the engine and others of increasing the cache size. I can't do the latter as access is via the greyed out option and I can't find any instructions for the former. I'm not convinced these would have much effect anyway.