That depends on what sort of harm you are talking about. It has caused disappointment for forum member darethehair (Darren Enns), who put a huge amount of work into porting gphoto2 for OS2008. His app works beautifully on Nokia 770 running OS2008HE, but on N8x0 it usually ends with total unresponsiveness of screen and keys, followed by spontaneous reboot and loss of data. Darren and most other N8x0 users have given up gphoto2 as unusable. For limited purposes, I find I can use it on N800 after custom configuration of HAL; but if I don't follow a strict procedure I still get caught by the freezing and rebooting.

As you have noted, dmesg output shows rapidly repeated switching between EAC modes, leading up to the freeze. This is true, even when the freeze and reboot are forestalled by promptly putting an end to USB host operation. As in your own case, there is no good reason for EAC to be doing anything at the time.

Nothing like this happens on the 770. I believe it is a serious bug in N8x0 running (many versions of) OS2008. Sorry to say, I don't know how to make a Bugzilla report. In any case, Bugzilla seems to be paying exclusive attention to N900 problems now.

Thank you for bringing this to the forum's attention. Now we know that it is not just caused by gphoto2.