I can fill the rectangle and other shapes and down the bottom of the screen near the fill and stroke is says 'unset'. However when I try to fill an elipse I just get these crosshairs with no fill and down the bottom where the fill and stroke is....it does not say 'unset'.

I have checked the opacity and it is 100%. Obviously I have done 'something to change this but I don't know what. I am new to Inkscape so have done something to change the default as it was working previously,

Any ideas please.

Thank you

Somehow you have managed to unset something, which is probably not what you want. The Unset fill or stroke is only useful for a couple uncommon features. If you don't know what those are, then you probably don't need to use Unset. (It probably happened when you clicked the question mark button in the fill and stroke dialog, hoping it would provide Help info.) To make sure your object fill is set (not unset) Object menu > Fill and Stroke > Fill tab > Flat Color (the button looks like this You might need to do that with both the fill and the stroke, depending on which one is identified as Unset.

Inkscape has this annoying default feature (which I hope to get changed, some day) of using whatever color you filled the last object with, on the next object. Here's a tutorial in case you want to change that for yourself. https://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/ind ... article=15

To figure out what's wrong with the circles, please share an SVG file with us, with a circle in it, so we can inspect it. I'm not sure what the problem could be, from your description. But if we can see the file, we can find out for sure.

You can either attach it to your next message, by using the full editor (not Quick Reply). Or upload it anywhere, and give us the link.