Text tool creates invisible 'artifacts'

That should be 'text' tool (not test tool).

Also.. I can no longer duplicate this bahavour in Inkscape: 0.46

This looked to be due to empty '<FlowRoot>' tags. I removed these tags from the document displayed in the screen shot and the visual defect went away

Paul,
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. A couple of notes for future reference:
1) You can change typos in the title/description via the "Update Description/Tags" link.
2) You set the bug status to "Incomplete" incorrectly, which has probably stopped the people who should be looking at this bug from looking at it. I'm setting the status back to "New". You can find more about Bug Status and what it means at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status

I'm getting the same bug, removing the flowroot tags does work, but I'm sure they shouldn't be there in the first place

A pre-release of the upcoming Inkscape 0.47 is now available in Ubuntu
Karmic for testing. Because *so* much stuff has changed compared with
the version you reported your bug against, would you mind re-testing
this new version and see if this bug is now resolved?

Karmic Alpha CD ISO images are available at:

  http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/

If you're not testing Karmic yet, there are .debs of this new Inkscape
for Jaunty, Hardy, and Intrepid here:

  https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.testers/+archive/ppa

You might find further bugs when testing this alpha release. If that is
the case, please file a NEW bug report here:

   https://edge.launchpad.net/inkscape/+filebug

Thanks ahead of time for your testing efforts, and enjoy the new Inkscape!

I am able to replicate this with karmic alpha 4 using the steps in the description. The empty text boxes appear as black rectangles

$ apt-cache policy inkscape
inkscape:
  Installed: 0.47~pre1-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.47~pre1-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.47~pre1-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I retested this with karmic + Inkscape 0.47~pre4-0ubuntu1 and the bug seems to have been fixed. Please reopen this report if I'm mistaken. Thanks

I just tested this on Ubuntu 9.10 with Inkscapea 0.47 and it still happens. I couldn't get artifacts to appear on the desktop background but the thumbnail still had them.

Interestingly in 0.47 you can select all of the empty text boxes with ctrl + A but not using the mouse cursor.

Should this be something that Vacuum Defs should take care of?

Ah OK, I get it now. This occurs only when rectangular text areas are defined on the canvas with the text tool. It doesn't happen if you simply click on the canvas with the text tool. Confirmed on Karmic with Inkscape 0.47~pre4-0ubuntu1.

related reports in Inkscape:
Bug #485269 in Inkscape: “Invisible and unselectable flow region in image”
Bug #349602 in Inkscape: “Textbox is unselectable after text is overflowed by empty lines.”

Artifacts are most likely due to:
Bug #167335 in Inkscape: “flowed text (flowRoot) must be moved to inkscape namespace”

Still present in inkscape_0.48.0-1ubuntu1

IMHO this report is a duplicate of bug #167335.

Note that the issue about 'Flowed Text' is mentioned in the FAQ (including the recommendation not to use it for files to be rendered by other SVG viewers) and in the manual:
<http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ#What_about_flowed_text.3F>
<http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Text-Creating.html#Text-Enter-Flow>

Tips on how to select and remove empty 'Flowed Text' elements are described in bug #485269.