android emulator does nothing, blinks in & out, or says too many instances running.

I've done everything to the 'T' in regards to installing the Android SDK/ADT. I've tried all methods to resolve this (adb kill, wipe data),开发者_开发知识库 but still nothing.

When I run it from the SDK manager, the loading process works, but once it is done, a flash of the emulator appears then quickly disappears.

Sometimes after it loads, nothing happens.

At the worst when it loads, I get the "too many emulator instances are running on this machine. Aborting" message.

I want to start making apps, but this seems to be the only thing stopping me!

Eclipse Indigo; r12, Windows 7 (64)

If you have Windows Firewall (or another software firewall) active, try temporarily turning it off and then running the emulator. If that clears up the problem, then you need to teach the firewall how to open up the ports the emulator needs.

Go through your services and kill anything you find from it, including the java runtime, then run the AVD Manager as Admin and start the emulator from there, that should fix it.

I try to always make a habit of running Eclipse as Admin too because it's needed for the Emu to run properly.