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

I also had luck with removing the *.snap files. Mine were located in a different directory than mentioned in the posts (below).

/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.projects

Consequently, the following unix cmd did the trick:

find /.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.projects  -name "*.snap" -exec rm -f {} \;