Dropped Frames during digitize

It's been awhile since I've had to trouble shoot, apologies if this is a novice question.
Trying to digitize plain old miniDV through Firewire, nothing fancy, has worked consistently until today, when I received this error after two trys of the deck
cueing up and trying to capture footage:
"Dropped frames were detected during the last capture attempt"
I've tried using different external drives as well as my desktop as the target drive to no avail.
I ran Disc Utility on my main Mac HD, to no avail.
I've checked other tapes, and I get the same error on everything. Even DV tapes that have worked in the past.
Any insights or hints of what to check or change would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

ok more details.
Capturing from a consumer Panasonic camera, using Panasonic tapes.
Easy setup: DV-NTSC (NTSC 29.97)
tried using Device Control FIREWIRE NTSC and FIREWIRE NTSC BASIC, neither worked
there is enough drive space, and I have to run out and buy another FW cable.
I'm just mystified, this set up has been tried and true for over a year.
The only thing that is different is I updated the Mac OS to 10.5.6 and hope
there is no correlation with that.
thanks.

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