iSight shuts down open apps?

I got an iSight a while back but only got round to trying it out last night.

I got it set up, plugged in the Firewire cable to the Powerbook and realised that all my apps had closed - it was almost like a mini-restart. That day's mail was showing as 'unread' again too which was odd but the history etc in Safari (when I reopened it) was all correct. I brushed it off and the iSight worked perfectly with iChat AV and I was able to connect with a friend.

Today, I plugged it in again and the same thing happened. All the Apps were closed (within seconds) including Synergy and another iChatStatus preference pane. My mail was 'unread' again

Tonight I unplugged the iSight so that I could update my iPod through that Firewire port and when I unplugged it, all the apps shut again! And the mail was once again 'unread'

Does anyone else's do this? I had a look on the Apple support pages and I read about Firewire problems and the iSight conflicting with other Firewire devices when they're all plugged in together but nothing like this.

iSight firmware is 1.0.2 and I'm on 10.3.7

 

Hmm... no-one on the Apple Discussion Forums seems to know either. And Googling just brings up the problems mentioned above with Firewire drives. It's particularly troublesome since when all the apps close, I don't get asked whether I want to save anything in them.

I don't think it's the Firewire port since my iPod works fine in it - although I suppose the iSight is drawing more from it. But if it is, I need to get a move on. This Powerbook will be 12 months old on 20 Feb!

I guess a trip to the Genius Bar is next on the cards - I wonder if I can time it with the Shuffles arriving!

 

Just in case anyone else ever plugs in an iSight and finds their Finder quitting and their Mac restarting, here's the outcome.

The problem got 2 Geniuses (Genii?) at Regent St perturbed. Neither of them had heard of an iSight causing a problem like that. After lots of switching firewire cables, switching iSights, creating new users, rebooting from the Genius's Firewire drive, daisychaining the iSight, deleting the ichat preferences - and some of the things I'd already tried like zapping prams and repairing permissions, it was still crashing the Finder. It was kinda funny - it would take about 10 seconds for the iSight to be recognised, iChat to open and then go down. Meanwhile the Genius and I are peering at it wondering whether this time we've fixed it.

Anyhow after getting it to work when the Genius booted from his drive as himself, we concluded it was a software problem. So since it was very busy, the Genius sent me home to try an archive and restore. 2 1/2 hours later (and much frustration when I realised that going back to 10.3.2 meant my Airport wouldn't work until I reinstalled all the updates) and success. I can now plug in the iSight without the OS going nuts.