I think at this point, we'd have to look at your SVG file, to figure out why this or that is happening. One thing that I've seen a lot, as well as experienced myself, when I was first learning. I remember clicking on anything and everything I could find, which I thought might help, but which I didn't necessarily know what it was or does, in trying to make things work. And eventually the file is full of objects (which sometimes might or might not be completely visible) which are behaving in strange ways, and options are enabled or disabled, creating strange behavior.
Sometimes it's a good idea, after one or more learning sessions, is to open a fresh new file, and start the project new. Or maybe copy the drawing into a fresh new file, in case you've gotten a lot of work done.
I'm not sure why tylerdurden suggested putting the drawing on an upper layer, locking it, and drawing on a lower layer. Usually it's the other way around, where it's a lower layer which holds the imported image and is locked, and you draw on an upper layer. But that weird gray area is not caused by the layer arrangement. It's from when, at some point, you were drawing with the Shape option on the control bar set to Triangle In or Triangle Out. That object apparently never was deleted, and you managed to select it and fill it with gray. Possibly when you switched the layers around, you hid the layer which the gray object is on, so that you just don't see it anymore. As I said before, I just can't guess what's happening on your canvas by now. I'd have to look at the SVG file.
I gave instructions to disable that red line that flashes when you mouse over a path. Here they are again:
Edit menu > Inkscape Preferences > Tools > Node
Uncheck "Always show outline".
If you did that, and it's still flashing, there might be other boxes to uncheck. Attached is a screenshot of my Node tool preferences. Using those options you will not see the red flashing line anymore.
Also, is there a way to set my preferences so that nothing I do in a previous work session comes back on my next session? It seems that when I use the zoom tool, it immediately goes way bigger that it should and I know that I saw on a video somewhere that you can do a "reset" of all the tools so that you are starting clean. I tried to find that but couldn't locate it
This isn't a video, but you might have seen this technique in a video:
https://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/index.php?action=articles;sa=view;article=15 That technique would not involve the zoom tool though. Are you talking about when you open the file for the first time since your last session, and it opens being already zoomed in? That would happen if either you closed the file while it was still zoomed in, or you had a crash while the file was zoomed in. However, if the file does open being zoomed in, you can easily set it back to normal by pressing the "1" key once. That automatically sets the zoom to 100%.
More zoom controls: The " ` " key (which is on the left of the "1" key for me) takes you back to the previous zoom, whatever it was. And Shift + ` takes you forward in your zoom levels.
