VDCAssistant seems to be causing perpetual crash reports As stated above VDCAssistant seems to be causing perpetual crash reports to the point that the ReportCrash system process will use 50-100% of cpu.

Application Specific Information:
Client is attempting to access a display by index (1) instead of display ID.
abort() called

These crash reports also seem to disappear and reappear. (i.e. the number of crash reports in Console.app never grows but are constantly being generated). The process cannot be force quit.

I have no idea whats causing this as I don't use iSight camera and nothing else is connected to laptop (macbook pro 4,1 osx10.9.2)

Logging out does not cure it, but a restart will.
Apple has changed something that interferes with some applications/drivers using the webcam, mirroring the screen (Airplay and Airplay-like) and providing USB graphic cards.

Uninstalling those (make sure to use Google to find what kernel extension they installed), make sure the system rebuilds the kext cache by running

sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions


and restarting solves the problem for most people posting to that list.

List of applications I found that might cause the problem, mostly out of a lengthy thread in the Apple support forum:


Air Display
AirParrot
AirServer
DisplayLink Driver
iDisplay
Parallels
Splashtop virtual display driver
ScreenRecycler
VMWare


Not all of this must be affected, and some are actually debated in the thread (like Parallels and VMWare). They might just do the touch mentioned above which some users probably didn't do.

Sadly this all didn't help me, so I decided to give up the camera until Apple fixed this and disabled the VDCAssistant (must be repeated after each boot, when the problem still occurs, and whenever something wanted to access the webcam). Has the advantage over deleting/renaming that you don't have to remind yourself undoing that if it finally is fixed; but you realize very well if the problem still persists after a reboot...

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.cmio.VDCAssistant.plist