Today, I encountered an annoying bug in Eclipse. All of the sudden (without any updates being carried out that I remember), Eclipse would simply die and print out only the parameters the JVM was initialized with.
Only when starting Eclipse in a shell will you see an error message which looks somewhat like this:

The program 'Eclipse' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)'.
(Details: serial 43551 error_code 158 request_code 148 minor_code 7)
...

After a short websearch, I found this Eclipse bugreport, which also contains a solution to the problem. It appears that Eclipse tries to load a wrong/nonexistent version of Mozilla’s XULRunner, which is responsible for rendering HTML parts within the IDE. Obviously, I encountered the problem as the autocompletion tried to display HTML code within a popup.

The solution is simple, you need to point Eclipse to the correct version of XULRunner. On a current openSUSE 11.3 installation, I used the direct path to XULrunner 1.9.2, the default is to rely on the update-alternatives system – and I’m not sure whether this might have caused the problem.
So if you encounter the error, you simply need to add the following line to your eclipse.ini file:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2/xulrunner

On a 64 bit installtion, it needs to look like this, though:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib64/xulrunner-1.9.2/xulrunner