Trying to build my first (or second, I tend to forget) Android project under NetBeans, I ran into an issue where the emulator would never show up when I tried to build the project. Turns out I even got a null pointer exception which I thought were generated somewhere else in NetBeans (next time: read the actual exception and don’t assume).
The solution to fix the emulator never showing up? Update the currently installed version of the JDK. (Thanks to a Stackoverflow thread for hinting in the correct direction) Remember that NetBeans might be tied to a particular version of the JDK (either in the command line arguments or in netbeans.conf in the etc/ directory of the NetBeans installation directory). I uninstalled any older version, which gave me an error about the value of jdkhome being wrong, and asking if I wanted to use the default path instead. That worked, but the error shows up each time. Comment out the jdkhome-line in netbeans.conf and it’ll guess automagically each time (if guessing works for you), or if guessing doesn’t work, add the new path to the JDK in netbeans.conf.