Sometime just after I launched a new emulator, for very first time I was trying to upload my apk, however I got \"emulator: ERROR: the user data image is used by another emu
If the emulator is still alive, you can tell adb to connect to it via tcp (which is I believe what it does anyway, only it normally uses an 'emulator' class of name and would now get a ip:port one)
It's been a while since I've had to do that, but I think that if you were using emulator-5554 you would connect to your development machine's loopback one port higher, ie:
adb connect localhost:5555
If it works adb devices will show it an eclipse should see it as a deployment option
The 'in use' problem sounds like a stale lockfile perhaps left behind in a crash