On Saturday I had a little scuffle with Netbeans. A week ago I had upgraded to ver 3.5. Menwhile my system administrator changed the network domain my XP machine was on and then the spate of problems began. Actually (and I don't know if it was a wrong thing) I forgot to copy the .netbeans folder from my user settings (document and settings/domain user) to the new user folder and inadvertantly started the IDE. Netbeans started fine and displayed the Project Explorer tree correctly but it won't recognize any Java library or compile a file. BTW I have both JDK1.3 and J2SDK1.4.1_02 on my machine.

I thought of asking for help and posted my grievance here. Alas! got no reply. Now, as expected, the Enternal compiler settings (Tool > Options > Building > Compiler Types > External Compilation) had vanished and the problematic part was: I was not able to edit it, the property value was displayed as “<no property editor>”, there was no ellipse button and nothing happend as I clicked on it. This despite the fact that I did not make any changes in any settings file that Netbeans stores in .netbeans folder under “Document and Settings/user name”. Ultimately I had to re-install Netbeans again. I did it atleast thrice but the problem was still there.

Fortunately the documentation at Nebeans came to my rescue. I checked the JDK version (details tab of Help > About). It was being displayed as JDK1.3. The documentation tells that in the event of having multiple JDKs on your machine the JDK home in must be specified explicitly in the ide.cfg file. So I added the following to mine and it worked.

-jdkhome c:\j2sdk1.4.1_02\

I also experimented by changing this line to point to JDK1.3 and was able to reproduce the problem. Note that I have JAVA_HOME environment variable defined on my machine (pointing to j2sdk1.4.1_02).

Does Netbeans 3.5 has a known issue with JDK.13?