Hi Friends,
I'm tempted to put this in the Off Topic forum because I think it might be somehow related to my system. But I have no idea where to start troubleshooting, if it is. So let's start with whether it's likely to be Inkscape or my system?

After I've been working on the same image for more than 2 hours, and not every time I work on an image, but from time to time, and after I've been working for more than a couple of hours, a button will become unclickable. When I mouse over, it no longer is highlighted, and it won't click (or more precisely, clicking on it does nothing). The buttons affected most often are Save (on the Command Bar) and the Node tool . It's as if they just wear out and stop working, lol. I laugh, but seriously I think it's because those are the 2 buttons that I probably use more than any others. Also the Selection and Zoom tool buttons have been affected, and once the Gradient tool button.

Sometimes if I close the doc and re-open, it fixes the problem. Other times, it doesn't. I thought for awhile that my copy of Inkscape had somehow become corrupted. But it was about time I upgraded to 0.48.1, so I did that a week ago (or less). Unfortunately, I'm having the same problem again right now (the Save button). Note that every time this has happened, I can still access the buttons' functionality via keyboard shortcut, or in the case of the Save button, also the File menu. So it's not a really big problem. But still is annoying, and of course I always want to make sure developers know about stuff that's important for them to know.

This has happened in Inkscape versions 0.48 and 0.48.1 on Windows 7, 64-bit, Dell Studio 15 laptop. It has happened on at least 3 different image/documents, and probably up to 5 or 6. As far as potentially submitting sample files, I won't be able to remember all of them.

So 1 -- Is this likely to be an Inkscape problem, or something on my end? Is there any other info I can provide?
2 -- Should I make a bug report at Launchpad?
3 -- Is there anything I can do about it?

Thanks for your help

It happens to me as well. I don't know the answer, but believe it's a memory issue, because when it happens, I open the task manager (click on ctrl, alt and delete at the same time), and the memory is pretty much filled up. I'm lucky if I can make it 2 hours, because it usually crashes around then from the physical memory being used up. I find that closing and opening Inkscape every couple of hours helps to prevent this.

No, it's not all the buttons. It's just one button. My CPU use in Task Manager is changing from 0% to 1%, and Physical Memory 54%. So not a cpu or memory issue at all. As I said, closing and re-opening doesn't always fix it.

What version are you running?

-Rob A>

As I said before, it's happened with both 0.48 and 0.48.1.