Posted by Eric Bartels

I have I nicely configured Windows XP machine for web development. It has Eclipse 3.4.1 with a variety of plugins installed (PDT, Subversive, …).
One day I had to install the odbc drivers to establish a connection to an Oracle database (the installation process of the odbc drivers is one of the crappiest things I have ever done. It took me more than two hours! But thats another story).

Surprise

After restarting Eclipse my whole configuration was broken. Most of the plugins installed where inactive and not working. I tried a new workspace. Same here. The plugins correctly reside inside the eclipse-folder. So nothing had been deleted. What is wrong?

I downloaded a fresh and clean Eclipse-PDT-bundle and started Eclipse. All was broken! No plugin was working…

Eureka

The “ultimate” Oracle universal installer installs a lot of stuff to get odbc-drivers running. It even installs its own Java-VM and sets this as default! (I never set yes to allow this). So in this case the Oracle-Java-VM was simply to old!
I added a new setting in eclipse.ini to use “my” virtual machine.

-vm
C:\Programme\Java\jre1.6.0_07\bin

Thank you Oracle!