Since the release of Eclipse 3.3 and continuing thru to the new Fall release I have observed an annoying problem when running Eclipse in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. Without any discernable reason or time frame, the Project Explorer window loses files and directories. They are not physically lost. The first time it happened I panicked but a check of the directory on disk revealed that all the files were there.
My first course of action was to restart Eclipse. This solved the problem and Project Explorer displayed all the files and directories. However this is a time consuming task especially when demonstrating code in the classroom. It happened again just yesterday.
With a little experimentation I discovered that by just closing the project and then opening it again (from the right mouse click context menu) the files were restored.
