Does anyone have a solution for this eclipse/IDE issue when creating a new Force.com project from sandbox or production instance (below)?

Taking default of "Apex & Visualforce" metadata components for download. Click Finish and receive dialog box entitled "Fetch Error".

Environment:

Eclipse SDK v.3.7.2 

Java Standard v7 update 4

Java Runtime 1.7 & 1.6 enabled.

Force.com IDE 24.0.0

FAQ states eclipse 3.6 & 3.5 are supported - although I have been successfully running with eclipse 3.7.1 up until this past weekend.

From the Force.com IDE log file:

DEBUG [2012-05-23 09:24:08,551] (PackageManifestFactory.java:getPackageManifest:110) - Found existing existing package manifest.
DEBUG [2012-05-23 09:24:08,552] (PackageManifestFactory.java:parsePackageManifest:946) - Parsing and creating package manifest instance from 'D:\My Documents\Workspaces\SF test\src\package.xml'
ERROR [2012-05-23 09:24:08,559] (PackageManifestFactory.java:getPackageManifest:115) - Unable to create package manifest
java.lang.ClassCastException: com.salesforce.ide.api.metadata.types.Metadata$JaxbAccessorF_fullName cannot be cast to com.sun.xml.internal.bind.v2.runtime.reflect.Accessor
at com.sun.xml.internal.bind.v2.runtime.reflect.opt.OptimizedAccessorFactory.instanciate(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.xml.internal.bind.v2.runtime.reflect.opt.OptimizedAccessorFactory.get(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.xml.internal.bind.v2.runtime.reflect.Accessor$FieldReflection.optimize(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.xml.internal.bind.v2.runtime.property.SingleElementLeafProperty.<init>(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)

thanks, -doug