I work in a Windows shop where I do a lot of design work in Inkscape, and often the rendering slows to a crawl - especially when I'm using blurring. Of course I place the blurred elements on layers that I can turn off, but it's still annoying.

I had the feeling that Inkscape was a bit snappier on my home Debian box, but it's an aging beast and hard to compare to the nice hardware I have at the office. So I took a long shot not expecting anything from it.

I installed VirtualBox on the office Vista-pc and then installed the latest Debian on a virtual pc. To my surprise the virtualized Debian Inkscape was a lot faster than the native Windows Inkscape on the same machine - even with plenty of overlapping blurred elements.

So this is my recommendation to fellow Windows/Inkscapers: Run Inkscape on a virtual Debian (or other *nix). Or install a *nix and Inkscape directly on a spare machine. I know I'll start hunting around the office for an extra pc.