Panasonic DS27 Camcorder IE1394 firewire out...

Question

Until recently my DS27 has been recognised by my pc and I have been able to capture video into 'Studio 8' - now it does not 'see' the camcorder...
the firewire port works with an external hard drive ... and I recently tried a modern canon camcorder which the PC saw and accepted.

I am running windows XP Sp2 - and have tried uninstalling 1394 from the device manager .. ..

the camcorder AV output works fine so i can download to a VCR tape..

Did wonder if I could use AV to input to PC, but believe my PC (1.3) is not fast enough?