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 tried all of the answers in this thread, and none of them worked for me -- not the snap files, not moving the projects, none of them.

What did work, oddly, was moving all projects and the .metadata folder somewhere else, starting Eclipse, closing it, and then moving them all back.