Hi,
In both trunk and 0.45 the dropper tool appears to be broken. Steps:
1. Remove preference file. 2. Draw square (it should be blue). 3. Draw circle (it should be red), leave selected. 4. Select dropper tool. 5. Move cursor over square and rectangle, note that the status bar is not updated, reads #000000 alpha 0 if Pick Alpha is checked, #ffffff if Pick alpha is not checked. 6. Click on square, circle turns white (or black of Pick alpha is checked and Set alpha not checked).
If it does work, try picking the color from a few more objects. It worked on some of the object I tried after doing a make clean, make install, but failed on others. I didn't see a pattern to which ones worked and which ones didn't.
Additional observation: if the dropper tool is click-dragged it works on those objects where simply clicking doesn't.
Tested with Fedora Core 6. Note that 0.44.1 works as expected.
Tav