Scanner software hangs

[Ziz]

HP 6470z -
P2/400, 96MB, 13G HD (plenty of space available), Win 98 1st Ed.

Dad's computer had an HP4100 scanner hooked up via USB for years. Got hit by a virus (the one that makes your icons move all over the screen when you try to click on them...don't know the name), cleaned it out, now the HP PrecisionScan LT software locks after the splash screen. Tried uninstalling and re-installing the scanner several times - nothing. Also tried hooking the scanner up to a different computer and it installed and operated perfectly, so the problem is in the computer, not the scanner.

Any ideas? Anything I should delete manually between uninstalling and reinstalling the scanner software?

[omega31]

I also had this problem on a church computer, an HP comp and HP scanner to boot. The problem for this computer was the lousy cd-rom drive. It refused to read the install cd for the scanner even though I tested it on other cd-rom drives (faster and slower) and it had no problems. Well, the installation wasn't complete, so the registry information for the scanner ended up corrupted.

What you will have to do is search out every registry entry for the scanner and any stray files littering about your system folders. Far easier said than done, since HP is the name for both scanner and computer.

A far easier way is to just suck it up and use the restore cd to set your system to factory settings (and a clean registry) and reinstall the scanner and scanner software. If you can run Windows setup and reinstall Windows without restoring, then you can try that instead.

So how was the church computer problem with the scanner resolved? Well, when I was away, someone ran the restore cd to fix a different problem. Ran the installation from the hard drive (used network to copy the cd contents) and everything ended up in working order.

Edit:
BTW, this problem is not HP's alone. It happens frequently with USB devices. If it's not set up correctly the first time, you'll have to do registry editing or registry replacement (through restore, reinstall, or scanreg). Also seems to get corrupted over time with scanners, since my USB Epson scanner requires me to weed out registry entries and scanner files and then a reinstall of the scanner and its software for me to get it to work again after not using it for some time.

[Cluedo]

HP uninstall reinstall tips here Has some tips on deleting hp scan files after running uninstall. Plus they give instructions on how to reinstall in Safe Mode if needed.