wish to delete posting as new facts emerged.

If a moderator sees this, please delete the posting.

It turns out the 100% CPU utilization problem is real, but has nothing to do with the code from the PAAD book. I am sorry for any confusion the post title may have caused. I would have deleted the post if it was possible for me to do so.

Setting up a Hello World example in Eclipse 3.5.1 and running it in various emulators (i.e. emulators established with differing versions of the android SDK) gave the same result, as did running various emulators without uploading an app. I usually develop in linux, but as it happens I have the same eclipse-sdk-adt plugin versions in Windows and the cpu utilization problem was not reproduced there. My guess (and it probably is an uneducated,wild, and wrong guess) is the problem dates to installation of the version 12 ADT plugin in mid-July.

The cpu utilization bug reappears often in various discussion threads and bug reports over the last 3 or so years. There are various workarounds, but some of them likely address issues that have already been fixed. In other words, your mileage may vary.

The most often mentioned workaround is to turn off "Orientation" in "Settings/Sound & display". This may be called autorotate in newer versions of the emulator/SDK. Switching this off did not fix the problem for me.

A purely practical move is to suspend the running emulator and resume it when needed. My biggest concern is the overheating caused by high CPU usage -- my main machine is my laptop. Here is what you can do in linux:

suspend: resume: This has the advantage of keeping an instance of the emulator around to test code when needed and avoiding the overhead of starting a new emulator, which takes 1 - 2 minutes on my machine, depending on the particular emulator version and whether it is being run for the first time. Sorry, I don't know of equivalent process commands in Windows, but I imagine they exist.