Lately I bought [MS] LifeCam VX-6000 web cam for my computer running Vista Ultimate x86. First problem I've faced was that I had to wait for [MS] to release its Vista compatible drivers since I was running Vista even before it went to retail shelves. Ok, that's not a big deal, I am patient person I guess.
The bigger problem was that after installing proper drivers they were working just partially - I could use messenger video call but I couldn't use LifeCam's control panel to adjust the camera settings - I always got an exception upon connecting (without any good error message of course). Since I had no clue what was causing the problem I waited again until I've spotted a thread (using Google groups of course) where a guy stated that the culprit was.....Nero (I admit, I've installed Nero 6.something before, Vista warned me that it isn't much compatible and might cause problems (this message was so true, I just didn't know at the time), but I was able to burn media just fine).
So, I skeptically uninstalled Nero and LifeCam's control panel amazingly started to work. Go figure.