Comment 2 for bug 178022

As far as I can see, both the public beta on inkscape.org as well as the nightlies from ishmal's site have an older version of lxml, 1.3beta-py2.5 packaged with them, under path/to/inkscape/python/Lib/site-packages (on windows vista). However they are seemingly not being found when you try to run any command from the Effects menu, thus producing the error message above. I see the same issue on Windows Vista. A commenter on bug 187290 -- https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/187290 -- (a duplicate?), wrote that the paths might not be set properly:

The downloaded Inkscape 0.46 does not seem to include an installer so I wrote a little .bat file to change the PATH before starting the program. The Effects then work because the python files are found.
runink.bat
set PATH="C:\directory\where\files\were\unzipped\inkscape\python";%PATH%;
set PYTHONPATH="C:\directory\where\files\were\unzipped\inkscape\python"
C:\directory\where\files\were\unzipped\inkscape\inkscape.exe

Addendum: I installed a new stable version of lxml (v2.0.1) into my existing Python 2.5.1 install, at /path/to/python/Lib/site-packages. Now I get a different error:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "share\extensions\embedimage.py", line 105, in <module>

    e.affect()

  File "C:\Users\..\path\to\inkscape\share\extensions\inkex.py", line 151, in affect

    self.getposinlayer()

  File "C:\Users\..\path\to\inkscape\share\extensions\inkex.py", line 119, in getposinlayer

    layerattr = self.document.xpath('//sodipodi:namedview/@inkscape:current-layer', NSS)

TypeError: function takes at most 1 positional arguments (2 given)

Hope this helps.