...around the Adam family compound

OK, now I have this running through my head... ;)

They're creepy and they're kooky,
Mysterious and spooky,
They're all together ooky,
The Adam Family...

/me grins. Don't worry, I don't really think you're ooky. After all, you're a computer geek Episcopal priest who plays WoW :)

First your computer now your other devices are being sought out by a poltergeist! This is of course the only solution to your problem. Take heed and be cautious when approaching the ghost.

Best
Joe

OK, here are some new clues:

My iSight sends a signal to the processor (System Profiler recognizes it), but iChat won't boot with the iSight connected (gets partway in, then hangs). I wish I could think of another application I had that calls on the iSight.

[Later: After a reboot, the iSight shows up and functions fine — but the hard drive is still MIA.]

Still won't recognize my hard drive, even though this is the olderdrive that I used with this TiBook for years.

USB, thank heavens, is perking right along.

AKMA,

I've had problems with older firewire devices being recognized by the system Automounter in 10.3 and 10.4. If you are comfortable with using the terminal / unix commands, I can give you a couple of tricks to manually mount the drive.

I've also found that by intentionally damaging the schema of the plist files related to the automounter service causes the original plists to be referenced from /system/library which can restore automounter service sometimes.