Using inkscape 1st time in suse linux 4.1. Normal use is Mac G5, Painter and adobe. Just messing around here, draw box, type name in, select all, move box, image breaks up into big choppy pixels, screen re-draws, a few seconds, breaks up again on next move. The suse box is amd 64 athlon, 8 gig ram, 512 nvidia graphics runs fast and smooth normally. After this back to the G5 and Painter, listen folks, inkscape is nice but really, what in the daylights is wrong? And no, I am not changing "distros", linux only gets e-mail.

I don't know what might be wrong, your system seems more than able to perform.

What Inkscape version are you using? Have you tried reinstalling it with deleting the preferences.xml?