I somehow made the fill window in the upper right corner show transparent on the left side and a color on the right side. When I would try to draw an ellipse I would just get the handles and no color. I searched the problem and the best I could come up with was to reset Inkscape. I renamed the preferences. xml file, restarted Inkscape and now I am back to square one.

In the future, how would I get the fill window "not" to show transparent on the left side so that I can use the paint bucket?

Thanks,
yeto

Welcome yeto!

The fill/stroke info in the upper right corner indicates the style for whatever tool is in use. By default, whatever style (color, transparency, etc.) you assigned to the last thing you drew with that tool, will be applied to the next thing you draw. It seems a bit silly to me (to have such a default) but it probably explains what happened. The last time you drew an ellipse, you probably filled it with a partially transparent gradient. All you need to do to fix the immediate problem, is to select the new ellipse and give it some opaque color. (Although if you've deselected it, and it's 100% transparent, it might be tricky to select it.)

You can always fix that problem in the same way (now that you know what happened). But another option might be to have the tool always draw in its own style. To do that, draw something with that tool and give it whatever style you want it to always have. Leave it selected, then open File menu > Inkscape Preferences > whatever tool. Click "This tool's own style" and then click the long bar that says "Take from selection". That's it -- now that tool will always draw in that style (color, transparency, etc.) I don't think you can assign a gradient for the style though.

Let us know if that doesn't solve the problem

and, just to make sure you have full opacity, be sure that your slider (in the Fill/Stroke) is set to 255 for all colors, the easiest way is to select the Wheel and move the slider that's under the wheel to 255. Sometimes it's the simple basics that can trip us up, errh, maybe that's just me, lol.