Sony Handycam not working

I thought I would bring this up again to see if anyone has found a fix that I
have not found.

I bought Vista (Home Edition 32-bit) in December '07 from Dell. For 5
months, my Sony Hi8 DV Camcorder worked great. I could download movies
without a problem using a 4 to 6 pin firewire cable (IEEE 1394) right into
Adobe Premier Elements 4.0 for editing.

Until May... at some point, the same camera via the same firewire cable is
now no longer recognized by the computer, or by the software, and doesn't
even appear in my device manager list. The only change I made was the
purchase of a Dell 22" LCD monitor with an intregal webcam.

I talked with Dell online, and they want me to revert to factory settings. I
didn't do this. I talked with Adobe online and they suggested deleting the
firewire port registry key. I didn't do this. I talked with Sony and they
said to have the camera fixed. I decided to have the camera serviced for $110.

Unfortunately, that did not fix the problem. The camera is still not
recognized. Thinking it might be the webcam drivers blocking the imaging
device, I tried to uninstall all the components of that webcam, but I don't
know if I did it correctly, because that didn't seem to work. And Vista goes
looking for the webcam drivers and loads it again.

I bought a new Sony mini-DV camera. That does not work either.

The cables and ports I have used all work because it allows me to plug in
and use my Sony CD/DVD-ROM device.

Any ideas why it would just stop working? And any ideas on how to get Vista
to recognize my camera?