Thanks to all for the posts but unfortunatley none of the above solved my problem. Eventually what got it all working for me was to download eclipse indigo 3.7.2 and (this is very important) EXTRACT IT DIRECTLY INTO MY PROGRAMS FOLDER. Before I would extract it to my desktop and copy into the programs folder (C:\Program Files) but I would jus get an error message saying "The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library" when trying to run eclipse.
After extracting eclipse directly to my programs folder I ran it and added the ADT plugin the way reccomended in on the android site and so far all is working well :)
I'm on a windows 7 x64 machine and had jre-7u2-windows-x64.exe, jdk-7u2-windows-x64.exe and installer_r16-windows.exe installed before extracting eclipse.
I hope this can help someone else too :)