Comment 7 for bug 1697681

Regarding your questions: Yes, the 7z archive only has to be extracted, then you can run "inkscape.com/exe" from the folder where you extracted it to. If you're finished with it, delete the extracted folder.

Regarding the issue I'm starting to run out of ideas... but I still got some ;-)

One thing you might try to rule out any path issues (as you mentioned there are some applications using fontconfig on your machine):
* Start a console (cmd.exe)
* execute "set PATH=C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows"
* run "inkscape.com" (from this console) and see if it works
If any paths with conflicting libraries were added to your PATH variable, this should solve it.

While on console: Could you at some time execute
* "echo %FONTCONFIG_FILE%"
* "echo %FONTCONFIG_PATH%"
It should not return anything, but if those environment variables are set (i.e. output not empty), that would be an issue.

Also to rule out an issue with your settings please rename the folder "C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\inkscape" to something like "inkscape.bak" and try if it changes anything (it's a long shot but worth trying).