Have you tried to run any applications on a PC with onl 32mb of memory lately? It's pretty much impossible. It seems all of the application writers in the world have gotten together and decided that their apps must have a working set of at least 32mb and take at least 64Mb of total memory.
I recently tried to get away with running Linux on a laptop, with the idea of using some 'other' word processor to look at Microsoft Word documents. Hah. Near as I can tell this can't be done. And, while there are some interesting word processors out there for linux, they are generally pretty large. Here's a sample:
Staroffice is pretty, but also pretty huge. I'd say 128Mb is a minimum. It does import work docs better than most. WordPerfect is pretty also and does not include a huge frame work around it. It won't import some of my word docs, however. AbiWord is the smallest. It actually seemed to have a reasonable footprint but also would not import some of my word documents.
As a wildcard I tried "Wine", the windows emulator. It actually ran WINWORD.EXE and EXCEL.EXE from my hard disk. A rather amazing feat. But they both needed about 64MB more memory than I had so my little machine paged itself within an inch of it's harddisk's life. (I later upgraded to 80mb and wine worked better. I may actually use word under wine if I find it's stable)
During this process I found I was running Netscape 4.72 and decided to upgrade to 6.0. Again, major bloatware. 32mb was suddenly way too small a machine for Netscape.
Personally I think it is a C++ conspiracy formed by people who don't realize that an automatic C++ object declared inside a function will call about 8 zillion constructors and allocate 12.5mb of memory each time the function is called, only to dump that 12.5mb of memory back on the heap when the function is exited...
If you really want to make a full time job out of this, you might check out http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Office/"