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So thrilled I was to see that Recovery Manager enables reinstall of selective progams!! But what a horror story this turned out to be . . . I firstly uninstalled HP Touchsmart Webcam program via Control Panel's "Programs & Features" > "Uninstall A Program" as instructed by RM.
During the uninstall process, RM's Uninstaller Wizard flashed several error messages onscreen all indicative that it was unable to write certain files - evidently a "permissions" issue - even though the UAC never popped up, I'm the only User, and was logged on with full Administrator level privileges. 2 (out of about 7 or 8) samples shown below:
Couldn't find "Msi,chm" in sys-wide search, and MSDN was of no help to me. So I hit the Uninstaller Wiz's "cancel" button. Apparently the cancel was not a full cancel-reversal because the webcam prog opened up with just a gray-black screen. So I ran the uninstall again, fully, getting no error messages this time. I then used RM to reinstall the Webcam program. Same orig identical problem. So I figured maybe it was a driver issue as per last sentence in pic below.
So ran RM again, this time to reinstall the drivers for the webcam device. RM said to open up the Control Panel's "Device Manager", right-click on the webcam device, click on the "General" tab page's "troubleshoot" button (or some such similar instr) and "follow the onscreen instructions". Well, there was no trouble-shooting functions on the "General" (or any) tabbed page of DM, because DM says the webcam is working just peachy-keen, fine and dandy . . .
At which time, apparently because Device Mgr detects "no problem", the Recovery Manager Driver Reinstaller just self-closes itself out. Did so Twice. So I next confirmed that the two specified driver files are indeed still existent in the specified sys folder where they're supposed to be:
So at this juncture I used System Protection to roll the PC back to the state just prior to the most recent major sys change, an illustrious Black Tuesday "Windows Update". The rollback went fine, but upon reboot my Norton 360 Ver. 6.0, which is about as glitch-free as ya can get, went absolutely bonkers. N360 made a truly valiant attempt to auto-fix and self-repair itself by automated uninstall & reinstall, but that 100% Hung during the attempted downloading of the reinstall. When the automated R&R failed, Norton-Symantec's site auto-offered-up their alternative user-initiated Norton Removal Program, and that did a 100% glitch-free successful removal and reinstall, after which I had the joy of going through all the AV prog's settings to set all of them to the way they're supposed to be for the best protection. So, cumulatively, after several hrs of eyeballs Elmers-Glued to the screen, here I still am, back to "Square One" with the same exact unresolved problem. Once I get the Webcam Program's pop-up box telling me to close out whatever program may be using the cam (when no program is doing so that I know of) the only item in the entire program window that's even active or working is the Close-out "X" button. I can't see how any other program could be holding the webcam program in an unreleased state, when nothing else is running, and because warm restarts and cold reboots make no difference either. I might be mistaken, but I believe the audio mike is integral with the webcam, and the audio function is working just fine for both speakers and sound-recording through the cam's built-in microphone. BEFORE the little mini-horror story here, I thought I got lucky when trying once again to get a video rendering prog to do a webcam import capture - The cam displayed field-of-view-video just long enough for me to say "Oh Kewl!" before it blipped out and went black-screen 2 seconds later, and I can't even get it to do that much now.
The program was working 100% great last time I used it. Does anyone have a clue or any idea what else I might try here, or what might be causing this? I might be missing it, but I haven't seen any email or direct IM-chat links with a HP tech-help-rep on their website - can anyone provide a link, email address or phone # for some HP staff help?
Thanks so much for the reply with a truly great tip . . . RM should have worked . . . But I think Mr. Murphy & his "law book" are alive & well, LOL ! 
I'd appreciate any other help or ideas anyone might think of.
