As described in http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/PLUG-33, loading a plugin from the web front-end in that has no plugin-info in its plugin descriptor causes a NullPointerException.

After trying this, future requests to Confluence result in this:

org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException: Invocation of method 'getText' in class com.atlassian.confluence.dashboard.actions.DashboardAction threw exception class java.lang.NullPointerException : null
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.ASTMethod.execute(ASTMethod.java:309)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.ASTReference.execute(ASTReference.java:207)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.ASTReference.render(ASTReference.java:250)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.parser.node.SimpleNode.render(SimpleNode.java:271)
at org.apache.velocity.Template.merge(Template.java:296)
at com.opensymphony.webwork.dispatcher.VelocityResult.doExecute(VelocityResult.java:91)
at com.atlassian.xwork.results.ProfiledVelocityResult.doExecute(ProfiledVelocityResult.java:21)
at com.opensymphony.webwork.dispatcher.WebWorkResultSupport.execute(WebWorkResultSupport.java:116)
at com.opensymphony.xwork.DefaultActionInvocation.executeResult(DefaultActionInvocation.java:263)
at com.opensymphony.xwork.DefaultActionInvocation.invoke(DefaultActionInvocation.java:187)
at com.opensymphony.xwork.interceptor.AroundInterceptor.intercept(AroundInterceptor.java:35)

Doesn't go away till restarted. Full error page attached.