Hi there,
I too have been having a torrid time of late trying to import video from not one but two different models of Samsung mini DV camcoder using firewire (VP-D362 and VP-D381) but believe I have solved this now.
I tried both camcorders on my Vista Laptop using a PCMCIA cardbus firewire adaptor very similar (if not the same) to the type sold in Maplins. Both camcorders were not recognised at all. I then tried the camcorders on my desktop XP machine which has a PCI firewire card and a friends XP machine with onboard firewire port and both camcorders were recognised fine. I immediately thought this was a Vista issue so set about crawling the internet for information on Vista and Firewire incompatbility issues, even trying some registry changes recommended by Microsoft (Vista not emnuerating IEEE1394 devices) and saw that a lot of people have the same issue - The adaptor was recognised and installed fine by the Operating System but any devices attached to it failed to be recognised.
I managed to obtain a XP laptop that conveniently had an onboard firewire socket and tried both camcorders with that and all was fine. I then installed the Firewire PCMCIA adaptor in that laptop and noticed that one of the camcorders (VP-D362) was being recognised but then after about 5 seconds disconnecting and the other camcorder was not being recognised at all. I then did a bit more research and noticed that the chipsets used in Firewire cards by the manufacturers appear to play a big part in devices working or not, especially camcorders.
From the research I perfromed on the web, most success was found with firewire cards based on the Texas Instruments (TI) chipset. The XP laptop I tried has a built in Firewire port with Texas Instruments chipset. Cards with VIA chipsets very much had random results (as I had found) as the two XP desktops I tried had VIA chipsets and worked fine but the PCMCIA card which was based on VIA was no good on Vista or XP.
You can check which chipset you have installed by going into device manager (Control Panel>System>Hardware Tab) and looking under "IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controllers". It should have something like:
"Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller" or
"VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller".
There are other Firewire host controllers but these two are the most prevalent.
I've now bought a Belkin PCMCIA Firewire card which is based on the Texas Instruments chipset and tried this on both the XP and Vista laptops and both camcorders are detected very quickly whether in recording or playback mode in both Windows Movie Maker and Cyberlink Power director.
Whilst it may be the case that I had a duff PCMCIA card, there are a fair few people who have been through the same as myself and ended up purchasing some form of Firewire adaptor (Desktop or Laptop cards) based on the Texas Instruments chipset and it's solved their problems as it has mine.
Can't say if this will solve your problem but it is an avenue worth exploring.
Hope this is of use to any other experiencing Firewire camcorder detection issues.
Cheers,
Professor