Hey Devs,
I've just committed a fix for that darn disappearing text and other items. The culprit was a blank _item_bbox, the code for _item_bbox was very sparse and looking back to the history of where it comes from shows that Niko Kiirala introduced it back in r3505 (2007) to improve filter effect handling when transformed.
What I've done is stripped it out and replaced it with the _bbox used for all the other operations. This means the bounds for the filtering process won't be different for the bounds during other parts of the process. See revision 12528 for the gory details.
What I should be sure of is what Niko was trying to do and if Ted Gould (r6891) or Krzysztof Kosiński (r10347.1.21) spotted anything as they were refactoring the code.
Please do test trunk for issues surrounding filters and transforms. I'd like to make sure fixing this issue doesn't introduce another.
Best Regards, Martin Owens