Comment 4 for bug 785701

This was happening to me as well. I did an strace on the process and it was stuck in stat() on a file in the recent files list. The file was on a cifs-mounted NAS partition that was hung due to a network disconnect.

For others who are encountering this, it might be helpful to kill all inkscape processes and then relaunch in a terminal by typing "strace inkscape" and then pasting the last thing it prints before it hangs into this bug report.