[news.eclipse.platform] Plugin is instantiated but bundle is null

[miles.daffin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Miles Daffin)]

Folks,

This one is driving me quite coo-coo. We have a plugin that function fine 
in 3.2. A lot of our users have just moved up to 3.3 and keep running into 
this NPE during initialization of java tooling:

java.lang.NullPointerException
  at org.eclipse.core.runtime.Plugin$1.run(Plugin.java:353)
  at org.eclipse.core.runtime.Plugin.getPluginPreferences(Plugin.java:356)

It seems like, under certain circumstances, the Plugin has been 
instantiated but the start method has not been called, hence the plugin's 
Bundle (bundle) is null. The call to bundleCopy.getSymbolicName() 
(Plugin.java:353) therefore throws the NPE. 

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening for some people and not 
others, and why it just suddenly seems to disappear?

Thanks,

Miles