While trying to capture from my miniDV camcorder over firewire into Premiere Elements 8, PRE8 would always crash. There were all sorts of things that I thought might be causing the crashes, and eventually I narrowed it down to a bug in the "device control." If the "Device Control" setting in preferences is set to "DV," then PRE8 crashes within a few minutes, if not immediately, of starting capture. So I set the "Device Control" setting to "None" and manually started playback of my camcorder. That eliminated the crashes during capturing.
Then I discovered another bug. The "Device Control" setting that I set to "None" kept getting reset to "DV" automatically when the camcorder was turned on. So while I thought "Device Control" was set to "None," PRE8 kept crashing away. Finally the way to make the setting stick was to make the change to the setting from the Capture window instead of going through the main Edit menu.