Dear friends:
Koffice 1.3.5 installed flawlessly. Configure, make and make install
were flawless. When I logged out and logged back into KDE, I discovered
that all of the Koffice applications were listed in their proper place
under Office, which amazed me. And everything else seems to work
perfectly, including the spellchecker in Kword. The error message
concerning the alleged absence of aspell at the end of configure turned
out to be wrong. Spellchecking works perfectly.
Naturally, I should have realized that I could install Koffice 1.3.5
instead of the very latest Koffice 1.4. Believe it or not, it just
didn't occur to me. But now all is well.
My thanks to everyone for their help.
Benjamin