Barbara -

Your Item 2:

The Mustak site that I found lists the driver for the 600CP scanner as WinXP (Compatible). This does raise the suspicion that they have not "qualified" their driver with Microsoft – but that shouldn't too much of a concern, as quite a few vendors (my Epson scanner included) do not have "Microsoft approved" drivers for XP, and they work ok anyway. There is an installation procedure at How to Install Driver that may be helpful. One thing to note is that the scanner must be disconnected when you "install" the driver, and you connect and "attach" the driver only after you've expanded the driver set from your download. If the scanner is connected while you do the "installation" from the Mustak web.exe, you may get unpredictable results, including the "hang" you described. (They actually recommend disconnecting the scanner during download of the driver files, although I can't see a reason for this.) The download is in 5 separate "disks," and given how slow the site is one wonders if they're downloading from floppies….. Sympathy extended.

Also note that if you've booted WinXP with the scanner connected, XP may have already installed a "generic TWAIN driver" that may or may not work if you can figure out what program to use to run it. The driver installation from Mustak cautions that you should uninstall any existing driver(s) before attempting to install their driver, so you may need to go to Start – Settings - Control Panel and see if the scanner is there. If it is, you need to "remove" it in Control Panel and "unplug" the scanner before you try to do the Mustak driver installation. The requirement that the drivers be "installed" before you connect the hardware is fairly common for USB devices.

Mustak states elsewhere that the drivers will not install with Norton AV turned on. They recommend, in fact, that you uninstall Norton and reinstall it after you get the drivers on the machine. You should be able to turn of your AV (Norton or other) to get the installation done.

John