Integrated Camera "not Plugged In"?

Recently I've been getting seemingly random error messages saying that a usb device is not recognized. In an attempt to fix this, I decided to update drivers and whatnot. I discovered that the integrated camera is the source of the problem; when I tried to update it, I got an error that it was not plugged in. However, this is clearly not the case; I took it to the (admittedly incompetent) tech support guy at my school, who moved my data onto a loaner computer while he tries to fix my own. However, despite the fact that I'm using a different computer, it still claims that the usb device is plugged in, so I am convinced that it isn't a hardware problem.