I don't have time to do any real work on this (this is my daily driver, use heavily for work phone and it's a time sink to backup/restore/fix /sdcard/0) today,but I took the boot.img and changed init.rc to include init.dlx.usb.rc instead of init.usb.rc and I believe that should get adb up and running for you.
To test, I booted viper 1.1.3 with the old kernel (no adb ever, but amazingly enough the display works enough for the boot animation) and booted it with the changed kernel which give me adb access.
I bet that was it for sure. I renamed some of the init scripts when I pulled them into the tree so it built a functional boot.img. I fixed it from my phone and updated. Hopefully if everyone re syncs and rebuilds the bootimage it should be good now.
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