Alan Horkan wrote:

tried saving as 'abc.......ab'

(the dots are unknown characters, some Hebrew some Arabic insterted using windows charmap. the two characters after abc look like accented versions of 'A' and 'a' but the other characters do not even display in the text entry and instead I just get empty rectangles)

got the following error.

Could not build file name from 'file:///U:/Desktop' and 'abc.......ab': Invalid byte sequence in conversion input

Guess what? As far as I can tell, that's not an Inkscape error, but a GTK+ one. It seems to be that the file dialogs won't allow you to build filenames/paths that do not map into the current "filename" 8-bit encoding.

If you have multilingual support (via Microsoft MUI or some such), you could try switching to a language that has those characters, then switching back and using the MRU list to access them.

Also (and if you can't switch language), you could use some text editor that supports UTF-8 to edit your preferences.xml directly and stick that name into your MRU list.

Hmmm... I wonder if it's time to use Inkscape to draw a little 'zone' diagram of the program and all the different points that could be affecting non-ASCII names? Hmmmm....