Comment 2 for bug 210336

Tried removing ~/.inkscape as per your suggestion, but the error still occurred.

I then took a quick look at the code in which the error is generated. It is shown if a Gnome VFS call to download an RSS feed using HTTP fails.

This led me to check whether VFS libs were installed, and they were. The description of the core libgnomevfs2-0 suggests that HTTP support is included, where a little more digging shows that in fact this support is in the libgnomevfs2-extra package.

Have installed this "extra" package and the import function now works. It may be that this package is not installed by default on Kubuntu; I will check this when I'm back at home at the weekend.