Comment 3 for bug 794852

Its not related to (a). I have never had a C: on this particular machine for old stored preferences.

Nevertheless, this evening I went ahead and tried both - renaming the .recently-used.xbel file as well as renaming preferences.xml so that it could create a new file - No change, the problem exists.

It is probably related to (b), but my observed behavior is different. I have access to an Windows-7/AMD64 machine and have created/modified multiple files on that - which opened just fine on this machine (XP SP3, Intel 32 bit).
Opening Inkscape always brings up the exception message, but I've not seen any file corruption.

It may have to do with something in GTK being hardcoded to look for C:\ rather than %APPDATA%