Canon Camera Connection Failures

The following notes apply to problems connecting to a Canon digital camera (PowerShot A580 specifically, but I doubt that matters).

After installing the Digital Camera Solution Disk (version 33.0), rebooting and connecting / turning on the camera, the window asking which application pops up offering CameraWindow, among other options.

Selecting that results in nothing happening. Attempting to run the CameraWindow application from the 'Start' menu usually results in the same (nothing), but sometimes a window comes up saying 'Cannot detect camera.'

The Device Manager shows the camera correctly, and it is "OK".

I can also just drag/drop pictures from it using Windows Explorer, or the Windows Image program, so the camera is communicating.

I deleted / re-installed the programs as well.

An e-mail to 'customer_support@canada.canon.com' brought the following suggestions:

The Canon CameraWindow is a Windows control service that handles communication between the Canon CameraWindow component and the camera in ZoomBrowser EX 5.5. This service applies when running on the Windows XP operating system. If this service is not started the CameraWindow component of ZoomBrowser will briefly flash on the screen and disappear halting camera communication. The most likely cause when this occurs is the "Canon Camera Access Library 8" service is unable to start due to a dependency failure. To resolve this issue it is necessary to access the Windows Services panel and enable the required service(s).

Please find the following instructions below in ensuring the required services are enabled.

1. First enter the Services panel. To enter the Services panel, select [Start], followed by Run. In the Run box type "services.msc" (without the quotations) and press Enter. You may also access the Services panel by selecting Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, followed by Services.

2. First verify the Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) service is set to "Automatic" startup and is started. Right click on the WIA service and select [Properties] to view the startup type and status.

3. Next verify the SSDP Discovery Service is set to "Automatic" startup by right clicking on and selecting [Properties]. Most likely the SSDP Discovery Service is disabled and needs to be set to "automatic". After ensuring the service is set to "automatic" startup select [Start].

4. Finally verify the "Canon Camera Access Library 8" service is set to "automatic" and started.

5. Exit the Services menu and attempt to use the camera again.

Upon following the instructions above the Canon CameraWindow should automatically display when the camera is connected and powered on in the playback mode.

Unfortunately, all these services were already running (I changed "SSDP Discovery Service" to 'automatic').

The next steps were to uninstall all the Canon applications, remove '.NET' versions 2 and 3, use 'regedit' to delete the 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Canon*' and 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Canon*' subtrees; reboot; re-install the Digital Camera Solution Disk, which also installed '.NET' version 2. The CameraWindow program still does not start.

The next step was to download the latest ZoomBrowser package ('zb611upd-en.exe'); no difference.


This page is maintained by Mike Peterson, mikep@rubberchickencult.ca.
Created July 30, 2008. Last updated June 27, 2017.