Comment 16 for bug 1130225

@suv You are running an outdated libxml2. Looks like it is a regression bug in 2.9 which is shipped with Ubuntu 13.04. See https://github.com/lxml/lxml/issues/98

I cannot narrow down the problem to simple reproducible example. You can build libxml2 from git and test for yourself. Here is the equivalent C code http://pastebin.com/3WAZj62N . Depending on where you installed libxml2, to build you can use

gcc -ggdb -I/opt/libxml2/include/libxml2 -L/opt/libxml2/lib tst.c -lxml2 -o tst

./tst | xmllint -noout -

tst.svg can be taken from http://www.sendspace.com/file/doyain .

Meanwhile it would be nice if Inkscape caught an exception and gave a user reasonable message instead of crashing in places like system.cpp

    if (!doc) {
        throw Input::open_failed();
    }