It seems unlikely to me that there is a hardware problem, and I speculate that it is rather software compatibility issue. I have no reason to suspect that my anti-virus software is blocking the camera, and I have already experimented with the Windows camera settings, but I have not resolved the problem. I can temporarily see the images captured by the camera sometimes before a problem occurs which seems to be at the device driver level. Note, I have downloaded a tool from Nirsoft called DevManView v1.71 that seems to me useful to display information about device drivers and their properties as an alternative to Device Manager.