It's more broken than that, unfortunately, since on my Ubuntu test machine the inkscape binaries from 12978 on no longer even get to the point where they put any graphics on the screen. The reason it is crashing is complex enough that it really is above and beyond the call of duty for other developers to have to figure it out. (For instance, the failure mode is different in the debugger than outside of it.) So, Martin, please pull out all of the image changes from around 12939 through 12978 and test them for a while in a separate branch. Before resubmitting them to trunk, please have people test your branch on other platforms. Or at the very least run valgrind on it and make sure there are no (new) memory access issues in the code you are adding. (Admittedly this is a bit of a pain since there are already so many memory issues in Inkscape.) These image changes must have worked on Martin's machine, presumably because the memory problems didn't happen to blow up anything there, but they are show stoppers for me. Thanks, David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech