[news.eclipse.newcomer] crash when starting Eclipse

[office@xxxxxxxxxx (Christoph Christ)]

Dears,

I'm quite sure, that this is a trivial and most common mistake. But it's 
hindering me in using the wonderful eclipse IDE.

I have WinXP with SP2, the JDK 1.3 from Sun is also installed, with all 
necessary programs. Following the FAQ I've also setup a link to the 
executable. But every time, I'm starting eclipse, The program crashes with 
the following javaw message:

JVN terminated. Exit code=-1073741819
C:\j2sdk1.4.2_08\jre\bin\javaw.exe
-cp C:\eclipse\startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main
-os win32
-ws win32
-arch x86
-showsplash c:\eclipse\eclipse.exe -showsplash 600
-exitdata c:\eclipse\eclipse.exe -exitdata 904_64
-vm c:\j2sdk1.4.2_08\jre\bin\javaw.exe
-vmargs
-co c:\exclipse\startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main

Sometimes I'm reaching the initial dialog where I can set the workspace. 
But anyway, it ends there.

Does anybody out there know a cure to that? 

j2sdk 1.5 I couldn't install at all... the installer didn't work....

kind regards
Christoph Christ