Yeeman,
We just went through something similar with Vista Biz as it was not recognizing our JVC BRHD50 Deck or a connected external harddrive via firewire. Long story short, it turned out feedback from plugging in a 'hot' firewire cable set off the protection circuit in the Deck frying the ports on the deck and the external drive. We quickly found out that other gear worked just fine and it wasn't a Vista or hardware problem with the NLE. After getting the deck back from repairs, it and Vista works just fine (now if we can only get Premeire to cooperate remotely with the deck in HD....)
Far as 'Movie Maker' goes, I only use it as a barometer to check if firewire gear is properly recognized. Also, (if you haven't already) check to see if your camera is recognized by another computer to confirm it's not the port on the camera. Also, it may be a longshot but check with panasonic to see if they have any firmware or software updates available for the camera. If it's 10 years old, it's not likely but worth a check. Bruce brought up a good point about checking to see if the port has been enabled in the bios. Sometimes, it's something simple like that or maybe you have a bad firewire cable.
