Hey there! I've recently begun exploring Inkscape, the drawing tools seem to work very well, and the software is pretty light, especially compared to so many commercial solutions. I'm having trouble customizing the hotkeys though - how do i change them? I couldn't find an "edit hotkeys" panel anywhere.

Copy /usr/share/inkscape/keys/default.xml to ~/.inkscape/keys/, then edit this copied file. Almost any keyboard shortcut (except "d" and space keys) can be configured this way.

And what would that be for Windows 2003? I see a default.xml in the .\Inkscape\share\keys\ directory along with some other xml's which i'm guessing are key templates. Can i edit those directly or do i move them somewhere after i edit?

^ Yes, you can edit the default.xml file directly from there. Or, you can rename one of the template files to 'default.xml' and Inkscape will use the template file.