I am new to Android and am trying to run the "Hello World" example in Chapter 2. I can create the AVD and it tries to run (you can see the phone outline and an ANDROID legend) but does not seem to run the simple "Hello World" sample. The "Preview" box in Eclipse shows the "Hello World" display which makes me think that it's the emulator that is not working.

I have loaded and reloaded SDK etc many times and am now in despair. I would really appreciate any help to get me started.

In the future, post the output of the Logcat view. That way, others can see if there are any problems in your code or if there is a problem when the application is built.

So what's in the logcat?

Agreed. The Log would be helpful. Most likely your AVD and application are supporting incompatible SDK levels? I assume you have fixed and moved on? Note: There are a lot of "issues" in the examples.