A new beta (Inkscape 0.48+devel r13438) incorporating the compile time option mentioned above is now available, and the good news it that it does not spawn a command line window on start.

This definitely seems to have been enabled by a compile time option probably for testing because it has now been disabled in recent commit 13434 to the 0.91 trunk. See
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.d ... sion/13434. Ever closer to the next release, woo-hoo!

You could possibly try to enable this debugging mode on previous versions. The following two links provide clues: https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/+question/194569 http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Frequently_asked_questions#Missing_console_output_issue With the old stable r9939, if I ca...

Grobe, I'm just confirming that I see the same thing, too, under Win 8.1 using recent development builds. I generally use the regular stable release build (i.e. "Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939"), and this console window does not appear. And I have used past development builds beyond r9939, and neit...