I found that my Netbeans IDE was not opening my Maven projects because it had some previous project metadata associated with it. This is just a quick hint on how to clear the project history in the Netbeans IDE. This has only been tested on version 6.8.

  • Quit Netbeans

  • Run the following command:

    rm ~/.netbeans/6.8/config/Preferences/org/netbeans/modules/projectui.properties

  • Restart Netbeans

You can be more particular about modifying this file as described on the Netbeans forums.