Problem description:

At the company I use Zend Studio for Eclipse Professional Edition to write PHP projects. It’s a great piece of software, but it still has plenty of bugs. This morning it suddenly refused to start — it got stuck on loading org.eclipse.php.core and the progress bar never moved again. I tried reinstalling over the existing installation and it still didn’t work, which left me baffled. Was I going to be stuck at loading org.eclipse.php.core forever?

Solution:

  • Move C:\Documents and Settings\*\Zend\workspaces\DefaultWorkspace\.metadata\.plugins to any other directory
  • Start Zend Studio for Eclipse — it launches successfully, but all the projects are gone
  • Close Zend Studio for Eclipse
  • Copy the contents of the C:\Documents and Settings\*\Zend\workspaces\DefaultWorkspace\.metadata\.plugins directory back (choose “No” to overwrite for every project it prompts about)
  • Start Zend Studio for Eclipse again — oh yeah, back to normal!