Due to some very strange and non reproducible bugs I deleted my NetBeans profile to get back to a fresh post-install state. This mainly hat two very different results: A positive one and the one why I am writing this post. The positive one is/was that the mystery-bug disappeared.
After deleting the profile, NetBeans wants to update all its modules to the latest releases – which is okay.
The problem however was that NB never managed to download all the modules and just got stuck randomly between 0% and 100%. NB just said “downloading …” but the task manager showed 0 bytes/sec traffic. First I thought that the download/update servers might be overloaded. After 3 days of repeatedly trying – I was very douptful about that first guess. Finally I sent an email to the NetBeans mailinglist, if s.o else also experienced such a problem.
The first answer came in just 70min after my question saying “I had this problem and found that if I turn off AVG I could get the plugins.”.
Uhoh – I didn’t mention my AV scanner in my post – yet I am using AVG, too. And – surprise – after disabling resident shield, mail-scanner, link-scanner and identity protection – NB suddenly was able to update to the latest version. Unfortunately AVG never said that it was doing something of that kind!
So the lesson learned: If some really weird stuff is happening, try to disable the AV scanner – but don’t forget to re-enable it!
Update: same happens with Eclipse when downloading/installing plug-ins. – At least AVG is consistent with blocking Java-IDEs.
Thanks for writing this note. This was definitely the issue for me, too. In fact, I narrowed it down to AVG “surf-scan,” a part of the link scanner. It also clashes with checking projects out of some subversion repositories (e.g., Unfuddle).