Whenever I try to run adb devices:
$ adb devices
* daemon not running. starting it now *
* daemon started su
It would appear that the ADB daemon on the device (adbd) is disagreeing with the ADB server process on your host computer as to which version of the protocol they are speaking. Which version of the SDK are you running and what is the OS version on the device you are debugging?
What you might need to do is actually downgrade your version of the SDK tools so that the ADB daemon and process are in agreement. I thought the server process was completely backward compatible, but this could be one of those corner cases where it doesn't. Google doesn't advertise the fact that you can get their old SDK tools packages, but they can be found by looking in the archives area at http://developer.android.com.