[Davros0]

Hello All,

I wonder if anyone can help?

I have a friend who I do a lot of remote computing for. Last week she (or should I say I, on her behest) tried adding a Logitech WEBCAM so she could could be seen by her daughter, in South Africa, whilst they were talking on Skype; personally I have never seen the point of WEBCAMs even when we were playing with SSTV on radio HAM years before there was a WWW.

After Dr Watson kept coming up with errors I finally uninstalled the damn WEBCAM. I then got an E-Mail the next day to say that her scanner (a canon CanoScan 4400F) was no longer working.

I naively thought "OK, this should be simple to sort". I took her, over the phone, through the process of installing the scanner. Still no joy. I then connected remotely and tried uninstalling and then reinstalling the software. Still no joy. The software says it cannot communicate with the scanner. After she suggested getting a new scanner, which is only about 2 month old, I suggested she bring it around to me. I throw it on my rig, and just installed the driver, without installing the scanner software. I then used my scanning software, VueScan, and scanned a £20 bank note without any problems; so I knew the scanner and USB lead were OK.

After she got it home I tried uninstalling the software and then the driver, from Device Manager, and then just updating the driver from within Device Manager. All I get is an error message saying that a better driver cannot be found, using the supplied installation CD. I then tried getting a driver off the Net, with the same error. Though Device Manager says it cannot find a better driver it shows a yellow exclamation (!) mark against the device. I tried using vueScan on her computer, using the generic driver, but it reports no scanner present.

I have tried using MicroSoft's System Restore to try to go back to before the WEBCAM installation date, as I am convicted this is the thing that started the trouble as she uses the scanner on a daily basis, but every time a try a restore it says it cannot do the task and no data has been changed.

Last night, out of desperation, I even tried deleting the driver under SAFE MODE but it still says the best driver is on there. I then REMOVED (moved) the c:\windows\twain32 directory (folder), but still no joy!

I few years when I had a similar problem with a Voodoo video card I finally got around the updating driver problem by removing its INF file from the c:\windows\inf directory (folder), but cannot find an entry for the Canon.

It has been suggested that I use an advanced unistaller, and though I have not dismissed that idea, and got the version by Ashampoo ready, I am convinced there must be an easier/quicker way to update this flaming driver. At the moment I could have formatted the computer about 5 times over, and reinstalled everything, in the amount of time I have wasted on trying to sort this out.

Her OS is Windows XP SP2.

Has anyone got a better solution?

HELP!