Try downloading the appropriate drivers from Sony's website and installing them.

Bleepingcomputer has an article on Vista Startup Repair you might find useful.

The other option of course if the camera is dead would be an external camera rather than an expensive repair/replacement perhaps.

K,

Did you look on the Start Menu to see if there is any access to the camera options available? It may be hidden in any folder such as Accessories.

I also find it interesting as to the cryptic characters published in your post. Is this normal for you or something new that might be related somehow?

DA

I'll try those suggestions and see if it gets me anywhere.

[damccoy- I don't see any cryptic characters. In my experience, if you're seeing that, it means the character encoding in your browser may have changed. Try switching between Western and Unicode, or vice-versa and see if it changes: ("View / Character Encoding"].

Funny I see the cryptic characters too. Firefox 6.0.2. Mine was set to Western, changed back to Unicode(utf-8) an don't see them now.

that has been mentioned by kudzu in his/her post about the webcam.

I have had the problem of cryptic characters showing up in different stages from just a few characters to a whole sentence or paragraph. So I was quick to try the setting described by kudzu. PRESTO!!, instant fix.

That's why I continue to read and learn from this forum.

Thanks again to Kudzu and all of you that take the time to share your knowledge.

I am aware of the coding and switching as suggested. My thought pertained to my never remembering K's posts published in a cryptic manner, and there might be an association with the camera concern. Admittedly a stretch, but you never disregard anything that is evident no matter how big or small until it has been proven inane.

DA

I then went to Device Manager, but did not see any listings for a webcam

How to Display Hidden Devices Drivers, see if it's possibility there???????

In order to show hidden devices:

1. Right click My Computer and Select Properties
2. Click Advanced tab
3. Click Environment Variables
4. Below the bottom Environment Variables window pane (System Variables), click New
5. For Variable Name, enter devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices
6. For Variable Value enter 1
7. Click OK. OK to close My Computer

Now open Device Manager, click on View, select show hidden devices from the menu

As far as the "cryptic character" issue, my guess is that kudzu composed the email in MS Word, then pasted it into IE. MS Word changes some characters (such as apostrophes and quotes) into special characters. IE picks up on that and displays them the way that Word does, but Firefox uses the character encoding the page says it is using and the characters do not display as expected.

Update...it's working now. I wish I could tell you what happened, but I really didn't do anything more to troubleshoot and it just started working on its own a couple of days ago. It's also now listed in the Device Manager where it wasn't before.

have you rebooted your computer lately...that might have fixed the problem as it sometimes does

I rebooted it several times before I even posted. That's not to say that some subsequent re-boot didn't fix it, but re-booting sure didn't help immediately.

if you can't find the webcam listed in the device manager, it probably means the driver isn't installed yet.

check with the installation disc that came with your computer, and install the necessary driver.

all the best.

It was working fine for the last two years before it decided to go missing recently, and it is showing up in the Device Manager again now that it's back from vacation.