[news.eclipse.newcomer] Re: eclipse help not working

[panajotis@xxxxxxxxxxx (pana)]

Hi,

the problem is not on the help server.
I had the same problem every now and then, but now I know why this happens.
One useful view is the "Error Log", open it and see the error.
I bet that there is an exception like this:
"org.apache.commons.logging.impl.Log4JLogger does not implement Log"

This error appears because some of your plugins includes the 
commons-logging.jar in its library jars and it shouldn't.
There's a number of plugins that include it and it's a different version 
of the one in your eclipse distribution. For some reason that I don't 
know, the classloader is confused. And for some even more weird reason 
this comes up when you access the help system.

One plugin that I know of and does that is SQLExplorer.
The solution is to find the problematic plugin and remove the 
commons-logging.jar from its files.
Just go through the plugin folder and look only for external plugins.
Close Eclipse browse their directories remove the file.

I hope this will help you.