Jimmy,
Thought I would say a few words on the subject of Visioneer tech support since I have spoken to 5 different tech support people in the past few days. All have been polite and friendly and more important, all tech support was free (as was the 800 telephone call) since the problem I had was undocumented. My chief difficulty was in getting the serial strobe to simply calibrate properly. I was told to uninstall from drive D, reinstall to drive C, run scan disk and defrag, and finally install the new driver from their web site, unplug the little plug from the back of the scanner for 15 seconds and pray. This latter instruction did tyhe trick for the next time I tried to calibrate, voila, it worked, and the unsightly vertical lines in my color picture scans disappeared. Unfortunately, no sooner had we solved this problem than Microsoft Word crashed, more than a coincidence, I figured, since Word had not done this to me in years. A Visioneer tech support person asked the amount of free resources on my C drive. When I told her I had 130 MB free, she suggested that this might not be enough for the humongous temmporary shared files and that I should try to repartition my disk to make my 1GB C drive bigger! I balked at this suggestion, called back and spoke to another tech support person who wisely suggested that I uninstall and reinstall Word. That did the trick. For the moment I am getting very good (not great, but solidly respectable) color scans AND decent OCR as well. Of course, the scanner is still the tiniest available and IS the easiest to start-up and use (once you get it to work in the first place). Why it seems to take so much tweaking to get it working is impossible for me to say. I don't imagine my problems were unique. Perhaps that is why Visioneer removed their customer support bulletin board from their website. It was a brave, if slightly naive, experiment.
After similar, if different, problems getting my HP printer to co-exist with parallel port passthrough flatbeds, I have come to the conclusion that scanners are simply a beastly species for many mortals, in spite of the raves in the glossies about how easy they are. If anyone believes otherwise they are deluded because, as you have noted, the complaints have spilled over to the usenet universe.
In conclusion, however, I am now quite happy with my Color Strobe. I don't know if Visioneer made any money on me after my $50 rebate and the 2 hours of tech support time that I consumed. But I am for the time being a happy Visioneer customer. God save me from ever being a Visioneer stockholder. I would not wish such torture on my worst enemy!
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