Android’s layout editor  for Eclipse is much improved in the 1.5 SDK vs. the old 1.0/1.1 versions. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that until yesterday, because the new controls didn’t show up for me. Instead, Eclipse just said:

Eclipse is loading framework information and the Layout library from the SDK folder.  file.xml will refresh automatically once the process is finished.

Of course, the process never finished. Because I never had any use for the old version, at first I didn’t even know something was wrong.

There seem to be a handful of people out there with the same problem, although none of the suggested solutions worked for me. Until I found this Spanish site. It turns I should have uninstalled the old Eclipse plugin before installing the 1.5 SDK one. In my plugin directory (~/.eclipse/plugins), there were still .jar files from the old version around (named 0.8, apparently). Simple removing those files and restarting Eclipse did the trick for me.