ok, now this is odd...
after a whole bunch of fooling around with AVview ( took forever to get the configure settings right ) and apt-get, now both xawtv and avview work, although only avview gets picture and sound, xawtv only gets sound. but v4l-conf still says that /dev/video0 isn't a proper device.
oh well... at least one of them works, if not perfectly. hmm... now all that's left is to reinstall again, so i can get rid of windows! :P
....oh boy. then i get to do this all over again. mabey i'll print out my .bash_history and just do that all over again
thanks for all your help guys
rebel