Eclipse: Silent Startup Error

Yesterday Eclipse started to show a strange problem. Invoking eclipse.exe would display the splash screen and would exit after that!

Since the program would not even display an error message, I first tried invoking it from the console to see any errors. It would exit without writing anything on the console. I then thought it might be a corruption of settings or workspace, but cleaning those did not help either. I then looked at the runtime options I could pass to eclipse.exe and tried those options related to a clean invocation and logging. Nothing helped.

I had almost given up when I noticed the eclipsec.exe in the same directory. This turned out to be a console executable of Eclipse. Invoking this finally showed the problem:

C:\Program Files\Eclipse>eclipsec.exe
Error occured during initialization of VM
java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: java/lang/Object

So, there was a problem with the JVM! I downloaded and installed the latest JRE and Eclipse worked fine after that! 😊