What Library/method are you trying to use? openkinect? openni ?

Have you try any other devices in the same USB port? it is very strange, does it work in OF or you have the same problem?

mice keyboards etc all work fine, and yea, same problem in OF, it loads, but all 3 images in the example files (IR, RGB and depth) just show all black. no image input. so strange.

I just switched to OpenNI last night and was confronted with many problems along the way. It took me about three hours to sequentially solve each problem, but now everything works fine. For the record none of the problems were with SimpleOpenNI, but with the drivers and software to make that run. Even though my experience was for winxp, perhaps I can still give some pointers.

First question I would ask is: do the drivers work? I don't know the mac equivalent of device manager, but are the three Kinect devices showing (motor, camera, audio) when you plug it in? This is step one, so fix this first before moving to anything else.

Second question, are the samples from respectively OpenNI and NITE working? If either did not work, provide some more detailed info on which software/drivers you installed and what's going wrong.

Once the drivers are good and the examples from OpenNI and NITE both work, my experience is that SimpleOpenNI will work without a problem.