I've been using Inkscape since the very earliest versions. I used to love it, but lately I'm finding it harder to use on Windows. When I go to find documentation, I encounter dead links, someone's blog, and a whole lot of ads. What documentation I do find is woefully incomplete. In some places, it seems like the documentation that does exist is a teaser to sell books. Worse, few if any of the items under Extensions work in Windows, which makes me wonder why they aren't grayed out, at the very least. If you include features that are exclusive to a subset of the platforms you support, you should disable the features and provide a clear understandable explanation as to why they don't work on that platform. Frankly, I don't understand why you'd include any such features unless they are part of supporting the platform. I don't see any good reason why you can't make the extensions items work under Windows.

Also, when I use filters effects, the processing, including scrolling, becomes so slow it's painful, and I've got a fast machine. Scrolling isn't exactly rocket science. If I haven't made a change to the image, scrolling should be fast and efficient. I haven't read everything in the forums or on the site, but it seems that someone should be working on fixing that problem, since it's so dramatic, and there should be some mention that it's being worked on in some place users are likely to see it.

It's tough enough to get people to try open source without them facing the kind of experience you go through trying to use Inkscape on Windows lately. Please spend some time working on these issues. I'm a big supporter of open source and it worries me when a program as important as Inkscape is now hard enough to use that I'm considering giving up and just buying a commercial package.

Have you seen the Inkscape guide? It's very comprehensive, and check out the heathenx screencasts too.

What windows version are you on? Try searching the forum and the bug tracker maybe you'll find similar windows problems. This version of Inkscape (0.48) will have subreleases with bug fixes, if you find any you're more than welcome to submit them to the bug tracker and test out the development builds and confirm they were fixed.

Filters are known resource hogs, in the 0.48 version there is now an option to use more than one CPU core that speeds up most of the pre-made filters, you can also control the rendering quality (decrease it to make things faster) but I guess the most popular way when working with filters is to change the Display mode to No filters (under View menu). More work is done on speeding them up in various directions, code refactoring, hardware acceleration, it just takes time especially on a volunteer base...

Every software has its pros and cons, you'll have to make your own count. Although often people on the forum say they've come from some other software application and like Inkscape better. Performance may be an issue but the Inkscape interface is said to be more intuitive and faster to learn. Hope you stay on the open source wagon