I am going through the Android tutorials and at some point an app won't load. The last message on the console is "Installing RelativeLayout.apk..." and it just stays there forever, instead of going on to the "Success" message. Visually, what is happening on the emulator is that it starts with the "A N D R O I D" phase, goes on to the chrome "android" phase, goes on to the home page, and then the little animating battery icon stops moving. After that we go back to the chrome "android" and just stay there forever. Quitting the emulator and rerunning the app doesn't help.
Looking at the log, using the adb tool with logcat, at one point the log lists service after service that died. This occurs right after this log message:
D/Zygote ( 32): Process 59 terminated by signal (11)
When I run adb logcat and have the emulator window visible at the same time, I can see that the battery icon stops animating just about when this message appears. No idea what this means.
I can fix the problem by going to Window --> Android SDK and AVD Manager which has a list of the AVD's if you click on "Virtual Devices" on the left. What I discovered to work is to quit the emulator, then in this window to select the AVD I'm trying to use, click "Start..." on the right, then in the Launch Options box that comes up, check Wipe user data, then hit Launch. The emulator will run until the home page shows up, then I can run my tutorial just fine.
What's causing the problem? What am I doing wrong? I blogged about this in my Into Apps blog and I'd like to be able to post the solution to the mystery as well.