In Windows the ".recently-used.xbel" file is stored in a wrong location.

I don't believe that is an Inkscape Win32 file. If you google "recently-used.xbel", it appears this is actually a file used on Linux systems like ubuntu and resides in ~/.recently-used.xbel

I believe Inkscape Win32 stores all recently used files in preferences.xml in the user application data folder. This is all handled by the operating system, and I believe Inkscape just tells it to put data in %appdata%, which gets translated to the following by the O/S
- On Windows XP that is C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Inkscape\preferences.xml
- I believe that in Vista that folder is C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Inkscape\preferences.xml
- {username} can also be "All Users" in XP, and probably the same in Vista, but I don't know for sure.

If anyone else has contrary information, please explain further.

Sorry, C:\Users\{username}\AppData on Vista should be C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming

Inkscape has a bug, because this file is NOT put in %appdata% but in c:\users\<username>.
See this picture:
http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/3098/inkbugef0.png

Please fix this bug, putting this file in %appdata% (C:\Users\<userName>\AppData\Roaming\Inkscape) and NOT in C:\Users\<userName>\

The real bug is that this file is created at all: it's essentially empty (and Inkscape keeps its list of recently used files in preferences.xml anyway).

I've marked this bug as "Confirmed", as I confirm that Inkscape does create the file (on Windows XP), and it clearly shouldn't.

OK, so somehow something's producing files there, which is not good.

I had a look and I had a recently-used.xbel file in C:\Documents and Settings\{username}, but when I look at the contents, for every file name it consistently says; 'application name="GNU Image Manipulation Program" ' So at least on my system, this file is being produced by the Gimp, which may even point to GTK as the problem, but I don't have any entries from Inkscape there, so that points away from GTK. There is a gsview32.ini file, which is Ghostview (works with Ghostscript as a viewer for postscript) and which may or may not use GTK. And also a kdiff settings file, which may be GTK, or may not.

What I do have from Inkscape, however, is a whole lot of files that seem to be temp files, and if I open them, they all say this at the top;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!-- Created with Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) -->

They all have names like;
Unnamed document 2.2008_03_24_17_32_55.0
New document 15.2008_02_25_21_56_08.1
draw-freelinkscape.exe.2008_03_05_00_33_22.0

I think these were generated when Inkscape crashed and saved autorecovery files, but I think it should save them somewhere else other than C:\Documents and Settings\{username}. Perhaps they should be saved in C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents, or whatever the equivalent is on Vista.

Now I don't know for sure, but there was a temp file patch in the latest version of Inkscape (from 0.46pre4 onwards) that changed the way temp files are handled, and it was specifically aimed at a Vista bug. So things may have changed since then. It's hard for me to tell whether the files I have were generated by a patched or unpatched version, but my guess is unpatched (the dates are all over the place until recently), because the patched version has not crashed on me yet.

What you should do is to delete any files you think may be generated by Inkscape or Gimp (perhaps back them up first), and then try running the latest version of Inkscape and Gimp in turn, and check when any files appear.

I just deleted them all, ran both Inkscape 0.46 and Inkscape 0.45.1 and did a few things, but no files were produced. I then ran Gimp, and as soon as I opened a new file it produced a new recently-used.xbel file. Something that was interesting was that even with that file deleted it still remembered the recently used files.

If you want to test Inkscape more, you could run 0.46 pre4 and test the one crash bug that it has unpatched (vs. 0.46 release), and that is to draw a 3D box, and then click on the tweak tool and run it over the 3D box. If this crashes, it may give a message that it autosaved the file, or it may crash less cleanly. If it does autosave, you can see where it saved it, and that will give you more information here.

Alternately you could download 0.46 pre3 and try doing "report a bug" from the help menu, which may cause a crash and an autobackup, but it may also crash less cleanly than that. Or possibly doing a save as XAML might cause the appropriate crash to cause the autosave, but again only on unstable pre-release versions of inkscape 0.46.

**Warning** back up your preferenc...

By the way, I can't fix this for you, as I don't know how, but I'm doing what we all need to do, and that is to narrow things down for someone who does know how to fix it. Hopefully you can learn by my previous post some of the deductive reasoning that is necessary to narrow down a bug report. That is the best way to get a bug fixed.

Did you look at the contents of the .xbel file before reporting?

In order to get Inkscape to create .recently-used.xbel I did the following: open Inkscape, draw something, save the drawing, and then close Inkscape. The .xbel file is created as Inkscape closes.

OK, the file contains the following and nothing more. Hopefully this will narrow things down for someone who knows more.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xbel version="1.0"
      xmlns:bookmark="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/desktop-bookmarks"
      xmlns:mime="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"
></xbel>

the string can be found in the file libgtk-win32-2.0-0.dll. So we will push this upwards to the gtk people.
Anyone knows the microsoft pointer about the new folder structure in Vista?
Adib.

the string in the previous comment I mean ".recently-used.xbel" Adib.

I can confirm the existence of this file, it is even filled with inkscape data, but at least on Windows Server 2008 it is stored in the right place.

on Windows 7, Inkscape 0.48.4, this file is stored at:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\

an alternative location might be

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\inkscape\

which is where the preferences.xml file is stored.