How do I prevent Eclipse from hanging on startup?

Question

I am using Eclipse 3.3 (\"Europa\"). Periodically, Eclipse takes an inordinately long time (perhaps forever) to start up. The only thing I can see in the Eclipse log is:

Answer 1

This may not be an exact solution for your issue, but in my case, I tracked the files that Eclipse was polling against with SysInternals Procmon, and found that Eclipse was constantly polling a fairly large snapshot file for one of my projects. Removed that, and everything started up fine (albeit with the workspace in the state it was at the previous launch).

The file removed was:

\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources\.projects\\.markers.snap