Comment 5 for bug 371386

hi,
The problem was in my preferences file and it has been resolved. Thanks everyone.
Found the problem in my preferences.xml and resolved the problem by comparing current file to a backup from a few days ago. In the preferences.xml there were these lines, many lines cut out just to show a bit of context:
<group
     id="tools"
     bounding_box="geometric"
     style="fill:none;stroke:black;stroke-opacity:1;stroke-width:1px;stroke-linejoin:miter;stroke-linecap:butt;">
<group
       id="shapes"
       style="fill-rule:evenodd;"
       selcue="1"
<eventcontext
         id="arc"
         style="color:#000000;fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;fill-rule:nonzero;stroke:#000000;stroke-width:1;stroke-linecap:butt;stroke-linejoin:miter;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-opacity:1;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-dashoffset:0;marker:none;marker-start:none;marker-mid:none;marker-end:none;visibility:visible;display:inline;overflow:visible;enable-background:accumulate"
         end="2.8302839e-12"
         start="2.2979501e-13"
         usecurrent="1" />

The start and end of the arc are very small numbers e-12 and e-13. If those lines are replaced with end=0 start=0 the problem goes away. It seems as if instead of creating a circle a very small arc was being created.

Switching to outline did not help. The layer was not locked. Opacity was 100%. Spirals were invisible but could be changed to visible by changing the fill and stroke but the circles changing the colour of the circles did nothing because they were actually very tiny arcs.

@Thomas Hicks: Thanks for noticing that the selection box was not showing. I had really thought that uploading a screen print of an invisible object was a stupid idea but should be done to show that I was "not imagining" an invisible object. You saw the image and noticed that something else was missing. Problems which have a quirk where something is missing catch my interest because it means that "nothing", the missing piece, is of more significance than something, the pieces that are there. It is always so difficult to notice, that is see, the "nothing". Almost wonder if that is a Zen thing.

Thanks again everyone.