Today Flash Builder randomly started hanging while loading the workbench on startup.

I found a lot of places that said to delete the .snap directory located at [workspacelocation]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources but there was never a .snap file or folder.

Eventually I found a trick here that said the following:

remove all the <editor> elements in workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.ui.workbench\workbench.xml

I did that and at least got Flash Builder to start up.

You apparently can also delete all the files in the [workspacelocation]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench as well (this removes your custom window layouts), but I haven’t tried this method.

As a last-ditch effort, you could do one of the following:

• delete your .metadata folder in your workspace folder. You will have to reimport ALL your projects after doing this.
• close Flash Builder, rename your workspace folder (defaults to “Adobe Flash Builder 4.7”), and re-open Flash Builder. It will create a new, empty workspace. Then quit flash builder again, delete the empty workspace, and rename your old workspace to its old name. Hopefully when you start Flash Builder again, things will work better.
• This post has the following workaround (copied here to protect against link-rot). This is for Flash Builder 4.5 but may work for 4.7.

  This happens because the Eclipse workspace gets corrupted. The easiest way I've found to recover from this is as follows:
   
  1. Use Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) to make sure FlashBuilder.exe isn't running as a process. End the process if it is.
  2. Navigate to your workspace folder (the default location is under your users folder in "Adobe Flash Builder 4.5", though you may have placed is elsewhere).
  Mine is c:\Users\grayson\Adobe Flash Builder 4.5
  3. There is a folder named .metadata (on Windows 7 there is an issue where it may appear as a nameless folder because Windows started truncating the "extension")
  move it to another location on your hard drive.
  4. Launch Flash Builder to make sure that this it has solved the issue.
  5. Close Flash Builder (this writes the default workspace settings to the .metadata folder in your workspace location)
  Inside the original copy of the .metadata folder you made, COPY the following folders to the same location in the newly created .metadata folder in your workspace folder, overwriting the files and folders that are there.
  .metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources\
  .metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\
  (as I mentioned before, Windows 7 can truncate the folder names to be without the last portion of the name, so you may see two folders that appear to be named "org.eclipse.core.runtime". Copying them will still work)
  6. This will restore the projects, workspace settings, and key bindings. (the dialog/window layout will be reset to the defaults and External Tool Configurations aren't copied. I looked but didn't find where those are stored)