I have an old scanner that worked fine on Windows XP, but the manufacturer is charging actual money for drivers that work on Vista and above. I'm not going to encourage that sort of business practice by purchasing the drivers, and I'm not really too enthused about buying a new scanner. I do have an old XP machine around that I've been using for scanning, but it is of course old, and it will one day die.
My standard response to situations like this is virtual machines, but the scanner is so weird that newer Windows OSes just treat it as an unknown USB device and refuse to do pretty much anything with it. Inserting it into virtual machines is difficult when it doesn't even display as a device.
The solution is to set the hypervisor to automatically connect USB devices to the virtual machine. In VirtualBox, this is done by adding an empty filter to the USB devices list in the VM's settings. It also has a button to add currently-detected devices to the list, so that's nice too. (If you have an empty filter, every device you plug into a physical USB port will be automatically plugged into the VM, which might be somewhat obtrusive.)
I did get my scanner set up in a Windows XP virtual machine and can scan documents even after that old box gives out.
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