How to diagnose eclipse crashes?

Question

OMG, eclipse (it's Gallileo, but with previous versions I also had such problems) crashed again, silently as always. That can happen one time per week, but this is really annoying. All I have now is a crash log. Are there any ways of discovering the true reason of these crashes?

Header of crash log, can't see anything useful:

#
# An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
#
#  EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x6d80f8d4, pid=1388, tid=3180
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (1.5.0_12-b04 mixed mode)
# Problematic frame:
# V  [jvm.dll+0xcf8d4]
#

Answer 1

Have you tried a newer version of the VM (such as 1.6)?

Answer 2

This is a bug in the Sun's Java VM which Eclipse triggers. These are notoriously hard to figure out. I suggest this approach:

1. Install a newer VM (1.5.0 16 or 1.6)
2. Disable all plugins you've installed
3. I had a similar issue with Groovy on Linux. I don't remember my solution but try a different version of Groovy in this case.

Answer 3

I used to have these kind of silent crashes on 64-bit Linux. For me it was fine after adding these lines to my eclipse.ini (see corresponding Eclipse and Sun bug entries):

-XX:CompileCommand=exclude,org/eclipse/core/internal/dtree/DataTreeNode,forwardDeltaWith
-XX:CompileCommand=exclude,org/eclipse/jdt/internal/compiler/lookup/ParameterizedMethodBinding,<init>