Today we had an issue with the Eclipse IDE showing the splash screen and closing prematurely. A look at a fresh eclipse.ini and the one in the current didn't give any differences.

The log file created in the .metadata folder of the workspace also didn't point to the exact problem.

Here are the things we tried:
1) Increase heap size in eclipse.ini
2) Removed the plugins specified in the eclipse.ini file
3) Tried a fresh Eclipse

Running eclipse.exe from command line didn't show any error messages. Then we tried eclipsec.exe present in the Eclipse_Home directory and it told that VM could not be located. The exact error message was:

NoClassDefFoundError: Java/Lang/Object

We tried to run eclipse using command line arguments like:
C:/>eclipse.exe -vm /javaw.exe
This resolved the issue and eclipse started fine.

Then we added -vm /javaw.exe to eclipse.ini bout eclipse couldn't start by double clicking eclipse.exe. Then after trying a few things we ended up with:
-vm
/javaw.exe

and it worked with the newline character.

The above information could be helpful to people who get into this situation in future

From http://extreme-java.blogspot.com/2011/04/specifying-vm-with-eclipse.html