Re: Botched scanner installation, persistent drivers won't go away...

From: Mike Hall (mike.hall.mail_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 10/04/04 

Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2004 06:45:45 -0400

What bloated software?.. Canon provide drivers, a program to conveniently
store your pictures, a good photo editor, and an OCR program for being able
to scan editable text.. seems to me that all of these programs are quite
useful to the average scanner user..

"Ichinisan" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:183201c4a9bf$a20c76b0$a501280a@phx.gbl...
> I've had this problem ever since Win95, but it made me
> particularly angry today.
>
> I spent the *entire* day reinstalling and configuring
> Windows XP Professional on my laptop with my new
> slipstreamed SP2 installation CD. Just when everything
> was perfectly configured, the last thing I tried to
> install was my Canon CanoScan LiDE20 USB scanner. I
> marveled that I was able to get all of the manufacturer's
> drivers so far from Windows Update, keeping the
> manufacturer's bloated software to a minimum. However,
> Windows Update had nothing for the scanner, so I went to
> Canon's Web site and downloaded the driver package. To
> avoid the installation of bloatware, I used a feature of
> WinRAR to extract the contents of the executable without
> actually running it. I was presented with all of the
> driver files and Windows was happy to find the drivers
> and automatically install the scanner. Windows reported
> that the scanner was "ready to use", but the
> Scanner/Camera Wizard never appeared in 'My Computer'. I
> tested the scanner with the Control Panel applet, and it
> said that all was well. I still had no way to get an
> image from the scanner. So I restarted the computer and
> nothing had changed. I was willing to run Canon's
> installer at this point, but I wanted to be sure that the
> currently-installed drivers did not persist. I
> uninstalled the scanner from the device manager, and then
> removed/reinserted the USB plug. It automatically
> detected and installed the scanner again, even though I
> had deleted the directory where it found the extracted
> drivers before. Windows reported that the scanner
> was "ready to use", but the utility was still not there.
> I uninstalled again, then searched for each one of the
> driver files and deleted them from Windows' system
> directories. Now Windows asks me to direct it to the
> specific files when I plug in the scanner, rather than
> prompting for a new driver. I cancelled the prompt, then
> returned to the Device Manager to try to reinstall the
> driver. The "Update Driver" button would not work,
> probably related to the botched installation with missing
> files. The Device Manager will no longer allow me to
> choose "uninstall", saying that the device is probably
> required to boot the system (Windows is confused). I
> finally unplugged the scanner without using
> the "uninstall" option and ran the Canon installer, which
> apparently did nothing besides extracting itself. When I
> plug the scanner in, Windows is STILL trying to
> automatically copy the previously existing driver files.
>
> It really is unexcusable that this problem has been
> around since Windows 95. When you uninstall a device,
> there should be a way to completely purge the system of
> all related driver software such that you can reconnect
> the device and have Windows behave as it did the VERY
> FIRST TIME. Now my fresh installation and an entire day
> is wasted. I may have to reinstall Windows again if I
> can't get my scanner to work.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks

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