Eclipse + MercurialEclipse Problem

Since I updated to Eclipse Juno 4.2 I've had problems a few times where Eclipse won't start - you just get a pop up saying an error has occurred and to look in the log. Often this seems to follow killing (Force Quit on Mac OS X) Eclipse after it freezes (locks up).

You can see from the log that the problem seems to be related to the MercurialEclipse plugin. I'm not sure if the original freezing is also caused by MercurialEclipse, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Side note: Mac OS X doesn't make it easy to access files starting with a dot, in a directory whose name starts with a dot. You can't really do it with the Finder (AFAIK). You can't even do it with an editor since the standard open file dialog also hides them. I usually just open a terminal window and cat /Users/andrew/workspace/.metadata/.log (On the positive side, you can copy the path from the error pop up and paste it into the terminal window.)

The solution I've come up with is:

• go into your Eclipse/plugins directory
• rename com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse_<version>.jar to ...jarX (i.e. add X on the end)
• start Eclipse (it should work now, but you won't have Mercurial)
• quit from Eclipse
• rename the file back (remove the X from the end)

For me, this seems to solve the problem. I'm guessing that what is really required is to "reset" MercurialEclipse and I've just found a roundabout way to do that.