Comment 5 for bug 210274

OK, so somehow something's producing files there, which is not good.

I had a look and I had a recently-used.xbel file in C:\Documents and Settings\{username}, but when I look at the contents, for every file name it consistently says; 'application name="GNU Image Manipulation Program" ' So at least on my system, this file is being produced by the Gimp, which may even point to GTK as the problem, but I don't have any entries from Inkscape there, so that points away from GTK. There is a gsview32.ini file, which is Ghostview (works with Ghostscript as a viewer for postscript) and which may or may not use GTK. And also a kdiff settings file, which may be GTK, or may not.

What I do have from Inkscape, however, is a whole lot of files that seem to be temp files, and if I open them, they all say this at the top;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!-- Created with Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) -->

They all have names like;
Unnamed document 2.2008_03_24_17_32_55.0
New document 15.2008_02_25_21_56_08.1
draw-freelinkscape.exe.2008_03_05_00_33_22.0

I think these were generated when Inkscape crashed and saved autorecovery files, but I think it should save them somewhere else other than C:\Documents and Settings\{username}. Perhaps they should be saved in C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents, or whatever the equivalent is on Vista.

Now I don't know for sure, but there was a temp file patch in the latest version of Inkscape (from 0.46pre4 onwards) that changed the way temp files are handled, and it was specifically aimed at a Vista bug. So things may have changed since then. It's hard for me to tell whether the files I have were generated by a patched or unpatched version, but my guess is unpatched (the dates are all over the place until recently), because the patched version has not crashed on me yet.

What you should do is to delete any files you think may be generated by Inkscape or Gimp (perhaps back them up first), and then try running the latest version of Inkscape and Gimp in turn, and check when any files appear.

I just deleted them all, ran both Inkscape 0.46 and Inkscape 0.45.1 and did a few things, but no files were produced. I then ran Gimp, and as soon as I opened a new file it produced a new recently-used.xbel file. Something that was interesting was that even with that file deleted it still remembered the recently used files.

If you want to test Inkscape more, you could run 0.46 pre4 and test the one crash bug that it has unpatched (vs. 0.46 release), and that is to draw a 3D box, and then click on the tweak tool and run it over the 3D box. If this crashes, it may give a message that it autosaved the file, or it may crash less cleanly. If it does autosave, you can see where it saved it, and that will give you more information here.

Alternately you could download 0.46 pre3 and try doing "report a bug" from the help menu, which may cause a crash and an autobackup, but it may also crash less cleanly than that. Or possibly doing a save as XAML might cause the appropriate crash to cause the autosave, but again only on unstable pre-release versions of inkscape 0.46.

**Warning** back up your preferences.xml file if you care about your list of recently used files and other settings in inkscape. Some of these crashes corrupt the preferences.xml file and you will have to delete it. There aren't really any other negative consequences of these crashes apart from losing the work you were doing if it doesn't autosave.

Cheers,

Rygle.