Say "No" gracefully.
My strategy in my household: All 3 systems run Ubuntu. 5 users, some 4 years old. Only I have admin. Problem solved.

In the office I'm forced to use XP. However most of the extended family now has issues with Vista... and since I've never run it I can quite honestly say that I have no idea how to fix a Vista machine. So, I say as gently as possible: "I can't help you."

For the ones I have a real soft spot for, like my mom:
- XP machine isn't running any non-licensed software. No WGA hassles (hopefully!)
- AVG installed & autoupdates.
- Windows autoupdates.
- Firewall enabled.
- Behind a cheap $20 router (surprising how much this helps)
- Use only FF (hid the IE icon and warned her about using it)... make sure you set FF to the default browser.
- As little local apps as possible... only openoffice and picasa.
- She doesn't get an admin account. Only myself and my brother in law do.

Surprisingly, the only time I've had to fix it is when my 14 year old nephew was on the box trying to install some hacked game he downloaded...

Once it's released you may be able to Install from a PPA such as this https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive/ppa.
It's currently for 3.1.1 in 9.04 which I'm using.
More instructions here:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-OpenOffice-org-3-1-on-Ubuntu-9-04-111105.shtml.
However you'll probably have to wait for a little while after 3.2 is actually released in November.

...isn't the technology, the UI, or anything else.

Granted, it loads slower than Vista from a cold boot, looks fuglier than outlook using 8-bit colors, and has usability problems up the wazoo (try explaining to a vp wtf replication is).

It's that execs don't get it. Is it email, a shared spreadsheet, a bunch of discussion databases... why spend millions on it?

This is why I got out of the notes game years ago. Sure, I could monitor a 10K user system distributed world-wide from home over a modem. But I sure couldn't sit at the boardroom table and get them to understand the value prop.

Now the SAP folks, they know how to market to the c-level folks.