I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 on a new Compaq Presario CQ56. The webcam was working fine for the first two days, in both Skype and Cheese, but simply turned black with thin vertical lines in the middle of a Skype call and now refuses to work in any program, including gstreamer-properties, Cheese, and VLC. It gives a black screen when rebooted into a live CD and tested. When tested, it either shows a plain black screen or black with thin vertical lines. Attached is an image of the video shown (it is static, there is no noise or static, and no response to variance in light). Also, when I play music or sounds, it makes a garbled noise related to the sound being played, which may or may not be connected to the webcam issue.

If anyone has any ideas on what caused this, or whether it's a hardware or software issue, or how to fix it, I would appreciate them very much,

Thanks