[Smoothie]

Good afternoon everybody, hope you had a great Christmas.

Unfortunately, one of the gifts I received this Christmas, a webcam (specificially, this webcam), refuses to work on my Windows XP Home computer.

The drivers appeared to install fine (although there was a warning about a missing streamci.dll, which I later put into my system32 folder), however when I try to view the webcam by going into My Computer > Webcam, it gives the following error message -



I realised that it may be a hardware problem, but the product works fine on a friend's Win XP Home laptop with similar specification. To make sure it was a fault with my computer in particular, I tried the webcam function of a conventional digital stills cam and the result was the same - worked fine on the laptop, but the same error occured on my computer. Consequently, I posted the problem here, suspecting it was related to my Win. XP installation as opposed to a hardware fault.

If anyone has any idea how I could go about trying to fix this problem, I would be hugely grateful. Is there any part of Windows I could reinstall or repair relating to its webcam support?

A massive thanks in advance to anyone who can give any help whatsoever.

PS: Service Pack 2 is installed on both systems.

Edited by Smoothie, 26 December 2005 - 09:50 AM.

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Further to my previous post, I've just tried to run sfc /scannow, seemingly to no avail. Although the computer is obviously reading from the Win. XP disc, no progress bar comes up at all.

[Smoothie]

Further to my previous post, I've just tried to run sfc /scannow, seemingly to no avail. Although the computer is obviously reading from the Win. XP disc, no progress bar comes up at all.

[gerryf]

where did that file (streamci.dll) come from?

Sounds like a bad install. Did this come witha disk?

you can try
start> run
regsvr32 "C:\Windows\System32\Mydll.dll"
<enter>

[Smoothie]

Thanks for your attention. I followed the install as the instructions specified, and the first time I did so, I got that error (missing the streamci.dll file) popping up. I then downloaded a copy off the net and put it in system32/ - then did a system restore to before any of the installation and started afresh (which seemed to be ok) - the streamci.dll file was no longer reported as missing.

As I say, I did the same install on an equivalent system, with no problems.

Thanks for the advice. However, when trying to register the streamci.dll, I get the following message:


The streamci.dll I downloaded from this message was this - http://www.dlldump.c...0/download.html

Thanks again.

[gerryf]

that generally means the DLL file is corrupt.

right click the file, choose properties

what version number is it (under version tab)

[Smoothie]

Interesting.

The version is listed as: 5.1.2600.0

[gerryf]

did you type

regsvr32 "C:\Windows\System32\streamci.dll"

( used mydll earlier)

[Smoothie]

Yep, I used that exactly and that was the resulting error message.

[gerryf]

OK,

start > run
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\qdv.dll
enter.

reboot, work?

[Smoothie]

It obviously did something (after reboot it said "Please wait" or something similar in front of the usual blue login screen, however it doesn't seem to have made any difference to the problem.

[gerryf]

Is this firewire, or usb?

If usb, remove the device properly (using icon in system tray), then go to device manager

start > Run
devmgmt.msc
<enter>

Select and uninstall all devices under universal serial bus componants.

reboot.

Wait while windows reinstalls usb componants.

Insert the webcam again

[Smoothie]

Cheers, will do.

//

Edit: Just realised that this computer doesn't react at all well to adding new devices - eg, just added a drive in Daemon Tools and plugged in a USB thumbdrive, both times resulted in "Windows could not load the installer for CDROM".

It also refuses to update with Windows Update, and didn't give me the expected progress bar for sfc /scannow ...I suspect its problems don't end with a single fault. I'm considering a repair installation, since I can't afford to risk losing its data.