I'm about to commit some changes to CVS re: the profile directory.
This one removes some of the less portable code (WTF did someone use creat()!? we have fopen()!) and reduces the number of platform-specific ifdefs to three. With some work it could probably be reduced further.
Also this fixes a problem with creating the profile directory initially.
The last change is that on Windows the directory is called "Inkscape" instead of ".inkscape", to be marginally kinder to Explorer and more Windows-like anyway.
(if we want to be really good Windows citizens, we should look up the locale-dependent name of the "Application Data" profile directory and create our subdirectory there, but that's a much bigger job. Bulia's change is a _big_ improvement and gets us much of the way there.)
-mental