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

Since I don't have a .snao or .prefs file in .metadata.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources folder (running on OS X), what did the trick for me was copy the .project folder to old.project, start Eclipse, and check

Windows -> Preferences -> General -> Startup and Shutdown -> Refresh workspace on startup

as proposed by matt b. After that, I closed Eclipse, renamed the folder old.projects back to .projects and after that everything worked fine again.