The quote: "I hate it when a new operating system comes out and it takes forever for companies to releash drivers that works. I mean it isn't like they didn't know it was coming out 6 months or more before it hits the market. I am not just blasting Epson. I think almost all of them are kind of that way."
You're dead right, every HW maker in the world had previous knowledge of the driver requirements made by Microsoft in order to have the 'Build for XP' logo on every box...
Like with every single Microsoft Product, one must wait for the Service Pack 1 (or 1a, 2, 3 whatever) until we can be pretty shure that we can have an fully working environment in Windows. I've had the same prob. with an optical mouse for my sisters notebook (it still doesn't work under Windows XP Home Edition), I'm still waiting for a new version of the driver so it can be put to work under XP.
As for the HW companies, they sometimes supply fully working (laboratory rats) drivers that simply crash in the Real World...
Your problem seems like one I had a few years ago with Netscape Navigator under Windows NT after I've installed a Service Pack from Microsoft... It's dumb but I don't think u should mix a EPSON scanner with an HP printer as they don't like each other very much.
eheheh