Eclipse shows splash screen and closes. How to fix?

one thing that i've come up with is deleting the folder:

workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.e4.workbench"

where workspace is your eclipse workspace directory

Start it from the command-line and see if it produces any error messages.

I added this in eclipse.ini:

-vm 
C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_20/jre/bin/javaw.exe

And it started. Then, however, one of my projects (a simple test project) did not resolve java.lang.String and java.lang.System. I changed the JRE to JDK/JRE, and it worked.

JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME were pointing to the above location.

There's a .log file in the .metadata directory inside each workspace, which often contains a number of stack traces from the Eclipse internals. Startup crashes are usually found here. I'm assuming you have Eclipse configured to start up in a specific workspace automatically, without prompting you to pick one at startup.

I have found that starting eclipse up with the arguments -clean -clearPersistedState will often fix crashes for me.