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I've noticed lately on my Windows 7 x64 PC that Inkscape (v0.48.4) is very slow to startup. Once the window becomes visible it will display "Not responding" in the title bar for a minute or two. Once it gets out of this fit it runs normally and smoothly.

I tried deleting the Inkscape user profile (%APPDATA%\Inkscape) and that helped for a while. But the problem just appeared again within a week.

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  • With or without high CPU activity? Inkscape spins a whole CPU core for a minute before it finally shows up here.
    – ygoe
    Aug 28, 2016 at 13:29

2 Answers 2

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Turns out the issue was with the Open Recent History. All of the SVG files I open are stored on network shares and move around quite a bit. Disabling this feature resolved the problem permanently. So, I suspect Inkscape verifies and/or reads various information about the files in the Open Recent History.

  • File > Inkscape Preferences (SHIFT+CTRL+P)
  • Interface
  • Click on Clear list
  • Set Maximum documents in Open Recent to 0
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  • 3
    I have the same problem, but all of my files are on local drives.
    – eidylon
    Dec 15, 2015 at 15:29
  • hmmm, can anyone confirm that this process works for Inkscape 0.92 on Windows 10? I followed these steps but Inkscape still runs slow on initial loading when I restart it...
    – klewis
    Aug 9, 2017 at 17:50
  • Just tried this and it is indeed a fair bit faster to start, though I had increased the size of the list to 30. I rebooted too, to test cold startup time. Definitely faster, thanks! My files are also all on local drives. Oct 19, 2017 at 10:20
  • This worked for me too. I'm on Windows 10 using Inkscape 0.92. As far as I know, all my files are on local drives. Mar 21, 2018 at 15:43
  • In my case, any "second" start of inkscape was somewhat faster than the first. Perhaps some of the improvement is based on that as well?
    – amenthes
    Jan 20, 2019 at 9:32
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The approach in Drew Chapin's answer made quite a difference on my machine.

Also, startup is slower the more fonts you have installed, according to this forum discusson:

I deactivated all fonts that are almost never get used (approx. 2/3 of them). And now Inkscape starts a lot faster.

I wasn't aware I got so much fonts installed, because I did not install them myself. Probably they were automatically included in the install process of some graphic and text applications I use.

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