Huh? I thought that hot plugging was part of what makes Firewire so great? Do other manufacturers have issues with this, or have Sony just done something daft in their design and not fixed it? The helpful guy I bought my camera from told me that you can buy a special surge-isolating firewire cable to prevent this, at a price of several hundred dollars.
Thoughts on this anyone? Looks like we should be careful.

I have never had issues hotplugging a camera… at least, not from the camera. My editing software has had trouble reading the camera a few times, but that’s all!
The dvinfo.net boards talk about it:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=64873&highlight=blown+firewire
I’ve never had a problem, though.