Error “The connection to adb is down, and a severe error has occurred.”

I’ve spent days trying to launch any Android program. Even “Hello World” gives me the same error:

“The connection to adb is down, and a severe error has occurred”.

I’m running Eclipse v3.5 (Galileo), Google APIs 2.2.8, on a Windows XP machine.

I’ve used all the tricks I can find on the web: the command line “adb kill-server”, the DDMS “reset ADB”, I started the emulator both before and after Eclipse, and searched for ports being used by other programs.

What is going on here? Is there a magic combination of versions of Eclipse, Java, ADB, emulator, and whatever else that works?

Try the below steps:

1. Close Eclipse if running
2. Go to the Android SDK platform-tools directory in the command prompt
3. Type adb kill-server (Eclipse should be closed before issuing these commands)
4. Then type adb start-server
5. No error message is thrown while starting the ADB server, then ADB is started successfully.
6. Now you can start Eclipse again.

It worked for me this way.

Restart your phone as well!