hooked Canon T3i up to USB and selected Gwenview to import pictures.

That it did!

However I could not copy the pictures from the camera...even tried dolphin

I'll try again later.

Under MS XP Prof and even(?) Fedora 15, the camera looks like a flash drive which looked like any disk. Copy and paste files was just like copying from say a flash drive to a HD

Software that comes with the camera is for XP Professional of course

Did gwenview or Dolphin print any error messages to the console or ~/.xsession-errors which documented why this is failing?