Today I try to debug with Eclipse. Apparently if you break on any method that takes a few seconds to complete and then try to do anything (step, resume, disconnect) you'll get a timeout exception in eclipse. Bug #95542 tells you all about it. Although the Sun JVM is probably at fault, since it doesn't allow asynchronous messages to be passed to it from a debugger, Eclipse really needs to be on top of this and provide a solution in the current release. It looks like the fix will be pushed out to version 3.2 (current version 3.1.1).