Whenever I try to run adb devices
:
$ adb devices
* daemon not running. starting it now *
* daemon started su
As mentioned above, the problem comes due to a conflicting version of adb.exe shipped with HTC Sync. Removing it from PATH won't help, as htcUPCTLoader.exe that constantly runs in the background will still re-launch the wrong ADB version.
One solution would be to completely remove adb.exe from the HTC Sync folder, however this would break HTC Sync.
I've just coded a simple tool that replaces the old adb.exe with a stub that invokes the latest adb.exe from the SDK directory eliminating the conflicts (e.g. version 1.0.25 coming with HTC Sync and 1.0.29 with Android SDK).
The tool can be downloaded from http://visualgdb.com/adbfix