Netbeans IDE not loading...

For all the Netbeans fans out there (I am certainly one of them) you may have come across at some point that Netbeans will not load after the loading of modules and you may end up with a blank screen or just a basic outline of the Netbeans window. After doing some debugging to find out what is going on the best solution I have found is to delete the Netbeans cache. You can find out where your cache is stored by looking inside your Netbeans conf file and you will see an entry similar to:

# ${HOME} will be replaced by JVM user.home system property
netbeans_default_userdir="${HOME}/.netbeans/6.7"

So for most Windows based users you will probably find your cache directory here:

C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\.netbeans

Simply remove the ".netbeans" directory (ensure Netbeans is not loaded) and you should be good to reload. Note though that you will lose configurations, for example you won't have any projects listed when you next load, also any custom services won't be listed like databases of web servers. I have found it is quick enough to put it all back in and you should be up and running again within a few minutes.