启动C++test时报错“an error has occurred, null”

I am currently using Eclipse Indigo Service Release 1 and out of a sudden received a strange error message when trying to open my workspace, or in fact any workspace:

“An error has occurred. See the log file [WORKSPACE-DIR]/.metadata/.log.“

Inspecting the log file, it seems that this behaviour was caused by an OutOfMemoryError error in a subpackage of org.eclipse.core which is somewhat strange, as I have plenty of memory available for the VM. A Google search for the error, suggested to invoke Eclipse via the command line with the -clean option:

eclipse/dir> eclipse -clean 

Eclipse successfully started again and subsequently also without the -clean option. However, an interesting message was writen into the log file:

!MESSAGE The -clean (osgi.clean) option was not successful. Unable to clean the storage area: C:\eclipse-dir\eclipse\configuration\org.eclipse.osgi.