Quoting Lou Quillio <public@...534...>:
Really? Wow. Then it must be X or Gnome on my end.
http://quillio.com/Inkscape/screenshot_eog.png
Above is what the SVG (Inkscape or plain) looks like in EOG, icon thumbnails, or if I import it into Gimp. Everything that can render an SVG on my system thinks it looks like the above -- except Inkscape.
All of those (except Inkscape) use librsvg to do their SVG rendering, but librsvg's rendering is currently fairly buggy.
Without having looked at the images in question yet, I suppose it's possible (but unlikely) that Inkscape's rendering is wrong, so I'd suggest comparing renderings with e.g. Batik or the Adobe viewer, which both have better SVG support than even Inkscape.
There are some things we could do to work around the bugs in librsvg, but they would make Inkscape slower... and frankly, given how widely librsvg is used, I'd much rather the librsvg maintainers were pressured to fix the bugs.
-mental