IDE death - javaw.exe

Help! I'm suddenly seeing weird behaviour with eclipse on Windows XP- everything starts running very slowly the second time I try a compile. Windows Task manager shows javaw.exe running at almost 100% cpu.

When I quit eclipse, both javaw.exe and eclipse.exe are left running, although the app windows close down.

Anyone else seen this - is there a workaround like deleting history files, etc..?

- Roddy