[nerdherd]

I'll try to explain what adb is and how to use it (hopefully this will help you understand what's going on a little):

First off, a lot of steps for rooting your phone and installing ROMs require you to enter commands into the phone's terminal/console (it's the "command prompt" of Linux). Now, you could type those commands in using the Droid's tiny keyboard, but that gets old pretty quickly, so Google made a program called "adb" (Android Debug Bridge) that allows you to give those commands to your phone from your computer using a nice big keyboard (it does other stuff too, but that's all that you need to understand).

Obviously you'll need to download the Android SDK (because that's where you get adb), which you've already done. You can extract the SDK anywhere you want. You don't need to "install" anything, only extract the SDK folder somewhere. Let's assume it's located at "C:\android-sdk-windows\" for this post.

Before you start, you'll want to add the location "C:\android-sdk-windows\tools\" to your system "Path". What that means is that you'll be able to run adb from anywhere once you open up the command prompt. Just by entering "adb (some command)" into the command prompt your computer will say "Hey I don't see a program called adb here, but wait, let me look in these other locations that the user told me to look for it." If you don't add it to the path you have to navigate to "C:\android-sdk-windows\tools\" anytime you want to run adb. The instructions for adding it are found on the sholes.info site.

Now that you have adb added to your system path you'll just open the command prompt and enter whatever command you want to use. There are a lot of different commands you can do, but you can just copy and paste them from the instructions and they'll work just fine. You'll notice that sometimes the instructions tell you to enter "adb shell" and then you get a "$" in the command prompt instead of a "C:\whatever>", that just means that you're directly connected to your phone's terminal and anything you type there will be executed on the phone.

Hopefully that sort of makes sense. This is just what I've figured out in the last few days while rooting my phone and installing some custom ROMS.

Now, to the specific problem at hand: if you're getting the .dll error that means it can't find the AdbWinApi.dll file. Look in the /tools/ folder of the SDK and you should see a file in there called "AdbWinApi.dll". If it's not there then you may have done something strange when extracting the SDK. Extract it again, or download it again.