Android Studio 2.3 Beta 1 + Support 25.1.0 = Preview broken

Question

Android Studio 2.3 Canary 3. Support libraries 25.1.0.

Layout previews are totally broken. Anything that contains a support-related View seems to break during preview.

In all cases, this is the beginning of the stack:

Exception Details java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: ViewBackgroundHelper   
at android.support.v7.widget.AppCompatBackgroundHelper.loadFromAttributes(AppCompatBackgroundHelper.java:46)   
at android.support.v7.widget.AppCompatImageView.<init>(AppCompatImageView.java:63)   
at android.support.v7.widget.AppCompatImageView.<init>(AppCompatImageView.java:56)
....

.. Etc.

Doesn't matter what the layout is like, I'm now getting this bloody ViewBackgroundHelper-related issue come up. Doesn't seem to matter what kind of layout is is or what views are in it.. anything that seems to go through AppCompat hits this error in the preview.

Have never seen this before. Previously had Android Studio 2.3 Canary 2 + Support libs 25.0.1.

Seems like it's just not possible to ever upgrade Android Studio or its support libs without spending hours on this type of stuff, hey?

Thanks for any hints, thanks-

UPDATE

Looks like I'm not the only one. Found a bug logged here, starred by many people already:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=230183

UPDATE 2

Still an issue with AS 2.3 Beta 1. Still can't see my layouts. Same java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: ViewBackgroundHelper error everywhere.

Answer 1

According to the issue tracker, as of Jan 10, 2017:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=230183

For those of you using the 2.3.0-beta1 Gradle plugin could you please disable the build cache by adding

android.enableBuildCache=false

to your gradle.properties file and let us know if that fixes the issue for you. After adding the line to your gradle.properties, please rebuild the project.

Thanks.

Has proven to solve the issue for some users.