Good news Lars
I finally succeeded in getting my DVC to preview and export projects. It had EVERYTHING to do with the project settings. I found my capture settings were conflicting with my preview and export settings. The settings viewer is an excellent tool to correct this, but you have to go through all your clips and make sure all the settings are the same.
I found the easiest way to do this was (in the settings viewer) to start with capture settings...check the settings...click next...which takes you to video settings...make sure it's the same...click next...which (I think) takes you to audio settings...and make sure it's set to the frequency your camera samples at...and so on and so on until the problem goes away.
No strokes of genius I'm afraid, just a simple process of elimination (and a good three hours of fiddling).
But your problem sounds the same as mine so hopefully it'll sort it out. Given the experience I NOW have I don't think it's a problem with either your camera or your system, so don't worry about that. Just check the project settings.
In my case the camera was capturing in PAL, and Premiere was trying to preview in NTSC. Obviously, it didn't work.
Also check scratch dick / device control. Make sure it's set for your camera and not a generic device (I'm not sure if this matters much, but I think it's worth doing anyway).
one more thing. Once your camera is previewing ok, you'll find if you print to video it just plays it back on the DV. Rather select export to tape and then select "Start Recording Deck" then it will go off automatically.
Good luck, I hope this helps (or at least gives you a glimmer hope, I know how frustrating it can be).
