First, as to your Firefox question, you can go here:
SourceForge.net: ubuntuzilla
Which will allow you to install Firefox 3.6.
OpenOffice is in the repos (1:2.4.1 openoffice.org suite) Please be aware that it doesn't add icons for every option to the menu, you will need to manually add them or type "openoffice" from a cli to start it.
On to aircrack-ng, I don't know of a way to pause it, I see there is a ticket open to possibly add it to the version 1.1 when released



