

When you see the 2 sided arrow appear, drag towards the left. You can drag it open by moving your mouse over the right edge of the canvas. The only last thing I could suggest is to open some other docked dialog first. Well, I guess we need someone with more expertise than I have. Maybe there are some options I don't know about, that could be somehow mixing up those requests? Try the import again, and double-check the titlebar of the dialogs that come up. But Inkscape doesn't send any outgoing signals, when you open those 2 pages.) (Oh, well actually, I have to correct myself. So I would be shocked if this has anything to do with a firewall! So the signal is outgoing, while firewalls block incoming traffic.

In those cases, Inkscape is calling your browser to go and visit those webpages. The only time the internet is involved with Inkscape, is when you click Help menu > Inkscape manual or Help menu > Key and Mouse Ref. And Inkscape lives entirely on your computer. As far as I understand, firewalls block things from the internet getting into your computer. And I haven't heard of a firewall blocking anything about Inkscape. I haven't heard of a Windows bug where the dialogs are produced at the wrong time. When you import an image, there will be a dialog popping up - it's called "png bitmap image import" (which clearly is a poor title, since many raster formats can be imported!) The Trace Bitmap dialog is titled "Trace Bitmap" (case sensitive for those titles). I'm not sure what the key shortcuts are, if you could be getting those mixed up? Oh no, the key shortcuts are very different - I don't think they could easily be confused. File menu > Import should not bring up the Trace Bitmap dialog, which lives at Path menu > Trace Bitmap.
