XWiki ignores settings in xwiki.properties

I use XWiki 3.2.0 with Java 1.6.0_29-b11 under Win 7 64bit. I want to use the Office importer application (http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Office+Importer+Application) and therefore installed LibreOffice 3.4.4 and imported version 1.20 of the office importer XAR successfully.

I manually started the OpenOffice server also successfully, then I started XWiki. In the Wiki administration section I see that all my settings in xwiki.preferences are ignored. I have there:

openoffice.serverType=0
openoffice.serverPort=8100
openoffice.autoStart=true
openoffice.homePath=C:\Program Files (x86)\LibreOffice 3.4\program
openoffice.profilePath=C:\Users\ust.PLASMA\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\3
openoffice.maxTasksPerProcess=50
openoffice.taskExecutionTimeout=30000

So in the Wiki administration I should at least see that autostart is on. But it tells me that it is off also the OO path is not recognized, it tells me
$ooconfig.homePath
using quoted paths does also not help:
openoffice.homePath="C:\Program Files (x86)\LibreOffice 3.4\program"

Even if the OO server might be misconfigured or has other problems, XWiki must at least detect that I use the autostart feature and display my given paths.

I played now a bit with restarting XWiki and the properties files and it turns out that I can change the properties file and XWiki ignores it in every case.
I have now played for hours and read many forum and mailing list entries and don't have a clue why this happens.

Btw. When I in the XWiki admin section under OpenOffice server press the update button, I get always a velocity script error. Clicking in the error, gives me no error message when i tried to restart the OO server, when trying to close the already running OO server, nothing happens. In the task manager I can see that the OO server is still running. When I stop the OO server via the task manager and then try to restart it via XWiki I get a velocity error but also no error message what went wrong when clicking on the error.