I have tested the kinect software with one I borrowed from someone else.
You know curiosity.
First the software is a tad slow under windows. (0.1 FPS was the max LOL). That's with my machine who may be suffering because of old USB support (win2K) but it did work (surprisingly).
It appears to be either inefficient in processing or something like that. It required POSIX thread support. If you aren't familiar with windows and how it supports threads for XP and prior generations it uses a 64 tick per second system and any one thread and suck down the system if you aren't careful. I suspect the use of POSIX thread support was a stop gap solution. I will try it next on my Linux box which is about 16 times the performance of my windows box and likely has fewer thread issues than this thing does.
I believe the kinect itself does little processing but provides data streams via USB. It's a generic USB hub with 3 devices attached. A sound (microphone) a camera device and HID.
The latter is a bit puzzling. Anyhow it seems that a lot of the 3d computation is done in the computer not the kinect. This explains the low cost for the device. A very MS way of doing things I guess.
However the way windows handles threads on my machine might be the other cause.
Most computers running windows 7 have no problem, but then again those are about 4 times more powerful than my machine.
It does work however, which is encouraging. I'm looking to migrate the build too my beagle board and see how it does. Fortunately the Beagle board has a DSP I'll see what I can offload onto the high performance DSP which is specifically setup for video processing. Might make the beagle board much faster using the kinect than my aging windows box.
OpenKinect.org is a good starting place.
If you want You tube stuff
goto Kinecthacks.net instead. There are links to source code there as well.
Cyb