I had the exact same camcorder and the exact same problem. I stumbled into a solution while playing around with the camcorder menu. Put the camcorder into the manual mode and you should be able to access its menu system. One of the menu option is marked "System." Under "System" menu is an option for "Reset." Select that and I guess the camcorder goes back to factory default settings. I assume you would lose all the custom settings but I guess that's better than the camcorder stuck in zoom.