Kbd focus can get stuck on Layers palette textbox

Sometimes, when having clicked on a Layer, and you then want to use a shortcut like Zoom in or out, you instead input to a popup textbox on the Layers palette which doesn't seem to serve a purpose. Not even clicking on the Canvas changes the focus, but clicking on a drawing object will. It is inconsistent, sometimes clicking on the Canvas, on or off the page, will get the focus back, sometimes not.
This pop-up text box doesn't actually do anything I can discover, so it would be preferable to remove it altogether as it is counterproductive, even if it was made to do something like select a layer, which doesn't need a textbox and shouldn't steal focus.

Inkscape 0.46dev Dec.31 build on Windows Vista