Eclipse 3.0 not recognizing plugins

In the previous version of Eclipse (3M8) I could simply unzip a plugin into the eclipse\plugins folder and the next time I launched Eclipse it would install the plugin. I just installed the released version of 3.0 and after unzipping a plugin when I launch Eclipse it does not recognize the new plugin. I discovered that the plugin was not being added to the list of plugins in the eclipse\configuration\org.eclipse.osgi\manifests folder. I have also found (after some tedious testing) that if I delete the last.config.stamp in the eclipse\configuration folder then Eclipse will install the plugin. It almost seems like Eclipse thinks everything is up-to-date even though I have added a plugin. I am on Windows XP.

Has anyone else had this problem? Am I supposed to install plugins in a different manner (I am still fairly new to Eclipse)?

Thanks for any info.

I have a similar problem, but do not see a last.config.stamp file ?

I believe the Eclipse 3 has different plug-ins scheme. Yes, you should just unzip it, but the plug-ins for Eclipse 2.x are incompatible with the Eclipse 3 and vice versa.

V:
The stamp file is in \eclipse\configuration\org.eclipse.update folder.
Delete it will make plugin work. I think this is a bug in 3.0

To improve performance, Eclipse 3.0 no longer checks the timestamps of the plugin.xml files under the assumption that most users won't be changing them. As a plug-in developer, you now have to explicitly tell the Platform Runtime by specifying -clean on startup (one time only). Deleting all the subdirectories in the configuration directory will have a similar effect.

This missed the online documentation; you can see the PDE specifies it by checking out the parameters passed to Eclipse when launching the Run-time Workbench in the debugger.

-- Dan