Exactly what happened to me. I am new to the Apple world and I was despairing trying to make my new Time Capsule work with the Macbook Pro. Had to reset them a dozen time for various problems ("server is disconnected" in Time Machine, connection drops on the TC (that gets DSL signal from an Ethernet cable), flashing amber led and no response from the network...etc). A couple of times Time Machine started the first backup then abruptly ended with an error...and TC was not there anymore. Always had to reset MBP (or Airport) and TC then delete the files on the Time Capsule disk that Time Machine created, prior restarting a new backup. I even tried to go back from 7.3.1 to 7.3 firmware, reset TC to factory defaults, unplug/plug power but nothing helped.
SOLUTION:
I had a Hamlet little (4 ports) USB 2.0 powered hub that I connected to the TC and four USB hard disks down the chain. Three of the disks were off, while one, a NTFS formatted Western Digital MyBook, was powered on (with its own power adapter) and connected.
Apart from not seeing any data from the macbook on the disk (the Time Capsule sees it as a disk that "needs repairing", unfortunately) since it is NTFS, the USB disk was causing all the aforementioned mess: just turning it off and voila, my MBP and TC go to wedding (TC led magically turns green and the wireless network respawns with stamina). Right in this moment I am one hour from the launch of the initial backup in Time Machine, and the connection is running fine. I think Apple should investigate better into connecting USB devices thru an hub to the TC, since it seems it can cause really bad unwanted and mysterious issues.
BTW can someone tell if the shared NTFS disks connected to TC can be read/written via the network from a Vista machine (or a Windows virtual machine in Parallels/Fusion)?
