Suddenly, objects are not behaving properly for me. For example (see attached screenshot), the semi-transparent red rectangle I want to lower behind the decorative band but above the background texture behind it. It instead skips a bunch of objects. It will only be where it is, the very bottom, or very top. The same with virtually all other objects in this file. 

When I group objects, they go haywire and switch their order from top to bottom rather than just grouping as you see them. For example, I'll group this entire group of objects and suddenly half the hash marks and the number 1 along the left side are gone, having lowered themselves below the pillar object.

I asked a similar question to this a few weeks ago, and the helpful user enlightened me to the layers in my workspace. That actually solved it for me back then. I would just select every object in my workspace at once, right click, and move them all to Layer 1. But even after doing that this time, my objects are not behaving. My layers dialog is showing me every single object is in layer 1. But I'm still having issues.

Please help!

Thanks,

Joe

I forgot to mention--sometimes objects will be visibly on top of other objects, yet they behave as if they are behind them. For example (see screenshot), the rectangular textured object is visibly near the top. But Im unable to select it with my mouse. I grab objects below it, that you can't even see in this screenshot. 

Getting very frustrated. I'm sure it's some silly user error but I'm out of ideas. Thanks for any help!!

Joe

Could be it´s stored in a layer beneath.

Grouping can also affect z-order. http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Z-Order.html

I'm going to expand on Polygon's comment. (No offence, Polygon.)

SVG is designed for rendering static vector graphics in a web browser. Layers are not necessary for this they're not included in the SVG specification. However, layers are very useful in graphic design workflows so Inkscape's developers implemented their own SVG-compatible version. An Inkscape layer is a group object with an additional XML attribute.

inkscape:groupmode="layer"

Web browsers will ignore this unrecognised attribute and treat the object as a normal SVG group. But this means that when you assign a shape to a layer, you're actually adding it to a group, which may change the z-order (shape stacking order) of your drawing.

This is different to CAD applications where layer tags are attached to drawing objects with no relationship to grouping or stacking order. Unlike Inkscape, multiple layer tags can be attached to an object. For example, show me the "doors" and "plumbing" on the "third floor" of the "west wing".

Thank you.
Through this thread I found a similar solution.  I had an image that would not go to the top and would not go to the bottom.
The file had no layers, or so I thought.