It's been a few weeks since I connected my Epson scanner to braindeath, the loaner Microsoft box I use mainly for photo processing. It has been flaky: much of the time it works, sometimes (far too often) it crashes. Today I was scanning some documents and stopped to look at something else. When I returned to continue scanning, the program crashed. And crashed. And crashed. Removing and reinstalling the software (if that's what really happened when I asked for it) didn't help. I'm dead in the water.
How do you debug this kind of problem? I wish I knew. I suspect that some remnant software or configuration information is in the way. Of course, maybe the scanner has failed, which would explain why I couldn't reinstall the software on the Apple. But it worked fine until then. Maybe it's trying to tell me to install SANE, but the meaning of that N still concerns me. The Supported Scanners page gives the lie: three different backends, one with complete support but unmaintained, and two others maintained but with only good support, with exactly the same status, except that the third doesn't have a man page. The man page for the backend with complete support, apparently not updated since 11 July 2008, does not mention this scanner.