I made the automatically created new gradients garbage-collectable. I hope this is the last change to gradients for this release, it was necessary because otherwise it was easy to grow the gradient list out of proportions (though it was also easy to shrink it by vacuuming defs, but this could crash Fill&Stroke; now it does not mind when gradients are deleted from under it). However when a gradient is edited (e.g. stops added), it is not autocollectable anymore. Please test this as thoroughly as you can. Here's the complete Release Notes entry for gradients:
* When you switch an object to gradient fill or stroke, the new gradient is created with that object's previous fill or stroke color going from 1 to 0 opacity (instead of the hardcoded black-to-white fully opaque gradient as before). New objects do not share gradients now, except when you switch to gradient multiple selected objects with the same fill color (you can also explicitly set two or more objects to use the same gradient by selecting it in the list in the Fill and Stroke dialog, or by pasting style from one object to another). Newly created gradients are automatically garbage-collected when no longer used; however, when you edit a gradient in the Gradient Editor, it becomes sticky and can only be removed, when not in use, by the Vacuum Defs command.