Force.com IDE – JVM terminated. Exit code=-1 Error [Solved]

Just installed Force.com IDE on my XP laptop, using the standalone installer from Salesforce website. This is a pulse based installer that installs Force.com IDE as an eclipse plugin. However, once the installation finished I was greeted with the following error: JVM terminated. Exit code=-1. Below is a screenshot of the error pop-up..

How to solve this issue : In my case the problem was that -XX:MaxPermSize of 512 MB was causing the JVM to crash. The solution is simple. open forceide.ini file. This file will be located in the same folder where your forceide.exe is installed. eg. “C:\Program Files\salesforce.com\Force.com IDE\forceide.ini”. The content of this file are as follows –

#utf8 (do not remove)
-startup
../Common/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.201.R35x_v20090715.jar
–launcher.library
../Common/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519
-install
C:\Program Files\salesforce.com\Force.com IDE
-configuration
C:\Program Files\salesforce.com\Force.com IDE\configuration
-vmargs
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
-Xms256m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:PermSize=128M
-XX:MaxPermSize=512M

To fix this error, change the value of -XX:MaxPermSize from 512M to 256M. After making this change, I was able to start Force.com IDE without any issues.