Whenever it encounters a problem that does not warrant launching a dialog, Eclipse saves a report in the workspace log file. The log file can be looked at in four alternative ways.
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Window > Show View > PDE Runtime > Error Log. This gives you a view with the contents of the .log file.
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Help > About Eclipse Platform > Configuration Details. This prints out a great number of details about the environment and also concatenates the .log file. Great for including in a bug report.
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Locate the file yourself, see workspace/.metadata/.log or eclipse/configuration/*.log
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Start Eclipse using -consoleLog. This will print the messages that normally go to the .log file in the enclosing shell/command window.
When the Java VM suffers a hard crash, it produces a separate logging file named something like hs_err_pid_XXXXX_.log. These files are also helpful for diagnosing problems.