epson perfection 1260 troubles

I'm having vast amounts of problems with my Epson 1260 USB scanner under SuSE 
8.1. I managed to get it working when I first bought it after having deleted 
the 1.0.8 SANE packages that came with SuSE 8.1 and compiled my own backends, 
frontends and xsane from the SANE project homepage. About a month ago a 
friend borrowed the scanner to run on a Windows box, and I just recently got 
it back, however now it doesn't work. The scanner still works from the 
friends windows box, so it's not a hardware problem.

I've tried deleting all the SANE libraries, binaries and configs and retracing 
my original steps (or at least as well as I can remember them), and have 
spent all evening digging through the various documents and trying variations 
on the config, like using the plustek and epson backends, coding the vendor 
and product id's in the config files, I have the following two lines in 
/etc/modules.conf, 

options scanner product=0x11d vendor=0x4b8
pre-install scanner /sbin/modprobe "scanner"

I've tried power cycling the scanner, plugging and unplugging (it does get 
detected, shows in /var/log/messages), pre-compiled packages from 
packman.links2linux.de, nothing seems to work.

One really strange thing, if I do

modprobe scanner

it spins off a whole load of child processes and eats up all the memory in the 
system - 1Gb RAM and 1Gb of swap, making the system freeze - did I mention 
I've tried resetting! :-(  insmod|rmmod scanner works just fine.

One other thing I'm seeing is the following line in /var/log/messages when I 
try and start xscanimage

scanner.c: open_scanner(0): Unable to access minor data

line repeats twice for (0) and then once for every number in the range 1 to 7 
- presumably looking at /dev/usb/scanner[0-7]

I've tried remaking the device /dev/usb/scanner0 also, which made no 
difference.

I know this thing works, but can't figure out where I'm going wrong. Anyone 
got some pointers for me?


Thanks



Steven