[BenBernard]

By any chance are you using a USB hub or extension cable between your Lifecam and the rio? We've had very bad luck with both.

As another diagnostic point, do they show up in the roborio webdashboard?

Lastly, the blue light on the lifecam turns on briefly and then off ANY time it's plugged into the rio...it turns on and stays on only when it is active.

We had similar behavior to what you describe on our rPi, when our (open-cv based) vision code was attempting to access the camera and failing due to a bad driver setting. To rule out opencv problems, try adding basic streaming code to your robotInit to see if that works.

In addition to ports switching (mentioned by another poster above) it's also possible that you are sending bad parameters to the openCV library. We ran into trouble with exposure and brightness settings--which are sometimes "remembered" by the lifecam and sometimes are not. A poster in another thread recommended resetting the lifecam using the windows utility, but I've never tried that.