When I run a program from Eclipse, the emulator appears with a padlock on the screen, which I then have to click on (twice, in two locations) before the application is allowed to run.
Is there any way to bypass this so that the application runs immediately?
Don't close your emulator everytime you run your application, you will only have to unlock it the first time.
Failing that there is a adb bash command that will unlock your handset. Although I can't see how you would get this working with eclipse and the emulator:
adb shell input keyevent 82