This time I did not uninstall the default LibreOffice 3 that came with the distribution. Rather I followed the instructions mentioned in the previous post and added the PPA followed by an update. I didn't realize that Base was not included in the default install I had, so did have to install it.
Was not surprised to find that Base could not open up the sample database just as before. So, that ruled out that doing the uninstall first on the other laptop caused the problem.
As before, running this command fixed the issue:
sudo apt-get install libhsqldb-java
