Eclipse: JVM Terminated. Exit Code=-1 June 8, 2008

Recently, for unknown reasons, starting up Eclipse gave me a nasty screen of errors, starting with:
JVM Terminated. Exit Code=-1

I've been using Eclipse and FDT for years, and this was the first time I've seen that so was stumped for a bit. Doing a search, gave numerous people running into similar problems, but frequently the error code was different, I'm not sure if "Exit Code =1" is a legitamate error or search engine indexing '-1' as '1'

What did work initially was removing the eclipse.ini, but then there wasn't enough memory being allocated for FDT (eclipse.ini has optional arguments '-Xmx' to tell the Java Runtime how much memory to save

Digging it turns

-vmargs was able to turn on/off the error. But then FDT wouldn't have enough memory to run

Having had the Java runtime recently upgrade itself to 1.6, thought that was most of it.    In the end, along with some other nasty issues (Explorer.exe taking 50% of the CPU and taking down any process)...I just ended up reinstalling Windows....joy.

It's working now, it  turns out that the first param needs to be in front of the others, and I've had stability issues when the value is high (e.g. MaxPermSize=512M).  Even though I have 3GB Ram, something between the JVM and Windows doesn't like it.

-XX:MaxPermSize=256M
-vmargs
-Xms40m
-Xmx768m