Well Harpgirl, I hope someone else can answer your first question becuase I can't. Having said that, I would suggest that your best plan of action is to read through the support pages at http://www.mustek.com and if neccessary send an email to their technical support department describing the problem and any error messages or symptoms.

I am new to scanners but for starters they can connect to a computer in different ways. Mine connects to the printer (LPT1) port on my computer and then there is a lead that runs from that to my printer. Although they both work fine, I am not sure whether this setup allows the printer and the scanner to be doing jobs at the same time or not. Other scanners use different interfaces, the USB one seems to be the most popular now.

With regard to your second question, I simply scanned an image at 300 DPI (I had my Vista Scan programme set for OCR) and saved it as a TIFF file which SharpEye read quite happily. I think that you will find that any combination of scanner/ scanning software will be able to do that.

Jon