I have a creative vista web camera which is not detected in Slackware 10.1 (2.6.10)and in Fedora Core 4 (default kernel). Does anyone know where the drivers are available and what do I need to do to get it working (like a kernel compile)? What do people do to get their webcameras working?

According to http://opensource.creative.com/webcam.html the following models use the spca5xx driver:
Vista VF0010
Vista PD1100 (note sataus SOON at http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html)
Vista PD1120

This seems to be a new driver which would explain why it is not in included in distros yet. Some distros have a packaged version of this driver available for download. For others you'll need to compile from source.
http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html

I check Linux compatibility before I buy a product.

i compiled the driver, and inserted it as a modules in rc.modules (i dont know if this is the way to go about it, as the mail at root says this is done after compiling the kernel). it does indeed load the module on boot. but the command spca5xx does not work.

my webcam is a creative vista model vf0090 which is not in the list of supported cameras (the closest is vf0010). i had most unfortunately not checked list.
any ideas?

vf0090 is sold as a Vibra Plus in other parts of the world, but that is not unusual for Creative.

Google didn't turn up any open source driver for vf0090, or even bridge/sensor details, so you may be out of luck with that model at least for now.

If it was mine, I'd open it up and try to identify the bridge chip and sensor, then search for any open source projects working on a driver for that bridge and submit details of the camera. Finally, I'd buy another webcam that is known to work in Linux and either donate the vf0090 to an open source project working on drivers for that bridge or sell it to a Windows user.