"That don't impress me much"

My aunt recently acquired a new scanner, a Canoscan 8800F, which looks and feels like a solid bit of kit.

Having installed the drivers, I wasn't able to get it to work in MS Word 2000, and kept getting "TWAIN Failure", with Word completely freezing up and needing to be ended from Task Manager.

Even more wierdly, Paintbrush and Irfanview had no such problems scanning.

I was getting some debug in \temp\TWAIN.LOG but not really enough to go on - my usual route of asking Google didn't give me much help but ..... I did find a useful little program called Twacker ( aka TWAIN_32 Twacker ) from TWAIN.ORG.

Within a fairly short space of time, I was able to see that my aunt's PC still had drivers from an earlier Memorex parallel scanner ( that never actually worked ). It's my assumption that Word was trying, and failing, to use this scanner.

I removed all the drivers ( mainly involving uninstalling the Canon drivers and then clearing down the \WINDOWS\TWAIN_32 directory.

Having rebooted the scanner and reinstalled the drivers, we're now back in the game.

The moral of the story ? Stuff is hard, even for old grey beards like me ....