Last week I removed the JRE that came with my laptop not realizing that eclipse needs a 32 bit JVM. It never tells you this, it just fails to start up. I finally found a .log (yes, without a prefix) in the .metadata directory of the workspace that I was trying to start. It had this exception
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Cannot load 32-bit SWT libraries on 64-bit JVM
.
Now I knew what happened and off-course now I have twice the amount of JDK's to manage on my system.