Eclipse freezing / crashing on start-up - How to get going again.

Monday 3 May 2010

1 comments
I've been suffering from freezes starting up Eclipse for quite a while now. It happens every few days for reasons I'm not sure of and it's incredibly annoying! My Eclipse Galileo installation has a number of plug-ins on top of it at the moment. Android Development Kit and the App engine plug-in are two of them, but I use lots more but I don't think its to do with any one in particular. Here is how I usually get going again...

  1. Go to the folder of your workspace and rename the project you were working on to something else, if you're not sure what project is that might be causing problems, rename them all or just move them to somewhere else temporarily!
  2. Start-up eclipse and it should start-up this time.
  3. Rename or move back all the folders to what they were and open them in your eclipse.
  4. Clean your workspace.
  5. Un-check "build-automatically" under "Project"
  6. Re-start eclipse.
  7. Check back "build automatically"
Working?

If you're having trouble renaming your project folder because some program has a lock on it, I would suggest downloading a neat little utility called Unlocker which just adds an option to your context menu for a file or folder.