Cannot get the flip camera to play videos or

You may just have a simple problem with the device 'Drive Letter' allocation.

When you plug in the Flip into your USB your computer will assign the device a drive letter, if this letter is used already say for a network or mapped drive or other USB connection the Flip will not be recognized.

To check and see if that's the problem, plug in the Flip and go to your desktop
(right click) on My Computer / Manage / Disk Management

In that list see if the device is listed (you'll know by the name or storage size of the device) If it's there right click and 'change drive letter' to an unused drive letter.

Hopefully this will fix your problem.