Camcorders forum: 1394 and camcorder problem with XP sp3 maybe solved.

I read many forums on people's 1394 firewire cards not installing and camcorders not connecting after upgrading to sp2 or sp3.
I totally fixed it by rolling back two drivers to the WinXP sp1 version. The two drivers are: 1394 bus.sys, and ohci1394.sys.
Now my ADS Pyro card installs (no yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager) and I have perfect captures and camcorder control again. Briefly, this is how I did it (CANNOT guarantee this will work for other people)

1. Uninstalled all references to the card, and the IEEE 1394 Bus Host Adaptor, from Device Manager. Rebooted into Safe Mode to double-check it was entirely uninstalled.

2. Shut down and physically removed the 1394 card.

3. Restarted and googled for the old, sp1 versions of the 1394 drivers, and downloaded them.

4. used start> search> files and folders to locate where the bad sp3 drivers were living on my computer. I found them under c:windows\system32\drivers. Carefully backed them up onto a thumb drive.

5. Went to replace the crappy sp3 versions with the older sp1 versions, but they kept popping back. Learned that Windows replaces them from the files sp2.cab and sp3.cab. I located those files and moved them onto the thumb drive, then unplugged the thumb drive! Now Windows could not screw with me by replacing the files!

6. Double-checked that the sp1 drivers were correctly put in place of the sp3 drivers. You can tell because the version numbers are earlier.

7. Shut down, reinstalled my Pyro 1394 card, restarted. The "new hardware wizard" saw the card, and correctly installed the sp1 drivers for it! No yellow excamation mark for the 1394 card in Device Manager anymore! The old sp1 drivers also install a needless "1394 network adaptor" (some kind of leftover, old-school networking thing) under Device Manager and I went to its Properties>Disable and disabled it.

8. Restarted several times, made sure the sp1 drivers "held". After a few restarts Windows figures those drivers are the ones supposed to be there.

9. Connected my Sony camcorder, fired up my Vegas Video 10. Went to Capture>preferences (I think) to tell Vegas Video to capture from the 1394 card. Perfect video captures and camera control!

10. Finally, moved the sp2.cab and sp3.cab files back to where they originally were. If I ever did a major update, or ran System File Checker, I imagine it would use these files to try and undo what I did, and I'd have to install the sp1 drivers again.

I should mention that I am an EE, worked on this problem for a while and probably read 150 "solutions." I installed some Microsoft Hotfixes related to 1394. I found a reference to certain updates that screw with your Registry enties for 1394 cards and sets them to "Read Only" so a 1394 card *cannot* install. This was true on my computer and I had to fix them by hand. I learned that the sp2 and maybe sp3 drivers were "crippled" to run at only 100 meg not 400 meg like firewire is supposed to do. Funny coincidence--firewire was designed by Apple.

But nothing fixed it until I simply rolled back the drivers to the sp1 version, which seem to work fine.

Hope this account makes sense, and this (totally not guaranteed) solution helps some people to use their camcorders and video capture. Before doing anything, please back up the system, set a Restore Point, etc., etc. as you have been told a thousand times before. Best of luck.