OS X and scanners...boy, I don't know.
I recently has the displeasure of trying to get a Microtek i320 USB scanner working with OS X 10.3.5. I'll take most of the blame, as I was the one that didn't check a single online review. Bad Pat, no doughnut!
This was by far, the most vile piece of software I have ever installed on an OS X box. I'm not exactly a novice and I pride myself with being able to trudge through even the worst software...but when you suspect the drivers of destroying your laptop display you know you are in for trouble. (Right now my trust TiBook is chained to an external monitor, but that's another story.)
So, as with most hardware you buy, the install CD is usually out of date. Again, something I should have checked, but didn't. So I download the latest and greatest from Microtek. It wasn't much better, in fact, it was just as bad. Now I'm sure a few of you are thinking that I'm a few gigs short of a terabyte for thinking that Microtek had anything to do with my display going out on me. But every time the drivers would load the external display would shut off as well. I only repeated this enough to be positive it was happening when the USB drivers were loading, lest I destroy my only CRT.
So I trotted back to BestBuy and picked up a HP scanjet 3970. It works fine. But I've noticed that scanning software for OS X doesn't really stack up well compared to it's Windows counterparts.