Why does MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a) crash when launching Simulink?

When I try to start Simulink in MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a), it crashes and I receive the following error message in a log file:

ERROR: #
# 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]
#

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

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:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/103056-how-do-i-change-the-java-virtual-machine-jvm-that-matlab-is-using-on-macos

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.