NetBeans 7.3.1 suddenly won't start at all

Question

Okay, so I've been working in NetBeans for the past year or so, and everything went fine until today, three days before big exam, I can't start NetBeans at all. As mentioned in the title i'm running NetBeans 7.3.1 and when I click on the shortcut everything the loading window shows up and then blank screen in the top left corner. ! I've googled this problem for the past few hours, and only found one solution: deleting lock file, but i can't seem to find them in my user dir. I'd really appreciate your help !! Thanks

Answer 1

Try uninstalling (completely) and reinstalling NetBeans. That will almost certainly fix your problem and will only take 10 minutes, which is much better than spending several more hours trying to fix a broken installation in a time-critical situation.

Answer 2

For what it's worth, I had the exact same problem and after attempting to re-install I realized that the issue was caused by incorrect permissions on /tmp .

Another installer for another application I had just installed as root removed write permission from /tmp and netbeans was failing to start because it couldn't create some temporary files there.