I shut down LibreOffice in a way it didn’t like the other day (or I can only assume), resulting in LO crashing every time I’d try to open a document. It’d flash the recovery screen for a split second before vanishing.

The quick fix for this is to update your registrymodifications.xcu file to remove the document recovery lines.

In Ubuntu 14.04 for LO v4, this can be found in ~/.config/libreoffice/4/user/registrymodifications.xcu (don’t forget to save a copy as a backup before making changes!)

Search for “RecoveryList” inside registrymodifications.xcu and delete the entire <item>stuffinsidehere</item> entry for recovery.

Save and restart LO, everything should be working fine now.

 

This was slightly modified from here:

http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/6376/message-recovery-failed/?answer=6383#post-id-6383