MATLAB: Does MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a) crash when launching Simulink

crasherrorexception_access_violationhotspotjavajrejvmmachineMATLABsimulinkstartsununexpectedvirtual

When I try to start Simulink in MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a), it crashes and I receive the following error message in a log file:
 #
 # An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
 #
 #  EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x77fcd989, pid=388, tid=2540
 #
 # Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (1.5.0_07-b03 mixed mode)
 # Problematic frame:
 # C  [ntdll.dll+0x4d989]
 #

Best Answer

This error may be caused by a Sun Java bug that has been fixed in a newer Java update.
As a workaround, try downloading and installing the most recent JRE 1.5 update release and set the system environment variable MATLAB_JAVA to point to that JRE installation.
Complete instructions for doing so are located at:
http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/data/1-1812J.html?solution=1-1812J
There are no API compatibility issues between update releases of Java 5.
As a last resort you could also try using Java 6. However there is at least one known issue with the documentation browser when running Java 6 with a pre 2008a release of MATLAB.
You can work around this issue by executing the command:
com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HTMLRenderer.setUseWebRenderer(false);
Followed by a MATLAB restart. This will switch them over to the old HTML rendering component (used before R2006b), which has somewhat worse HTML rendering but at least won't crash.
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