For a couple of years I've been fighting with a UMAX Mirage II scanner,
trying to get it to work under OS X (currently 10.3.8).

UMAX doesn't support OS X and, for a while I was booting into OS 9 when
I needed to scan, then switching back, which is a pain.

I bought a copy of Hamrick's VueScan, which works for me occasionally,
as does the demo version of LaserSoft's SilverFast SE that I tried out.

Here's the problem: The software won't find the scanner if I boot up
the scanner before I start the Mac, nor will it if I let the Mac boot
up, THEN turn the scanner on. Occasionally, if I start them both
mnore-or-less simultaneously and get them both shouting down the pipe
at each other at the same time, then everything works - assuming that I
don't then wait too long and the scanner goes to standby, or whatever,
at which point they can't find each other again.

Needless to say, this is REALLY annoying.

Has anyone else run into this? Rick at Hamrick couldn't figure it out,
so I'm expecting that I'm pretty much scrod (as we New Englanders say).

Unfortunately, I wprk for a smallish city government, so the likelihood
of finding the money to replace a (more or less) functioning scanner is
unlikely at this time.

In case the specs will help anyone spot the problem, they are as
follows:
*50 MHZ G4 Quicksilver running OS 10.3.8
Asante (I think) SCSI card
UMAX Mirage II scanner attached on the SCSI chain along with a Zip and
a Jaz drive. (Note: Normally I'd suspect some sort of SCSI voodoo
problem and try changing the order of the items. In this case,
unfortunately, each device has a different connector configuration
(15-pin, 25-pin, and 50-pin connectors, IIRC, with adapters where
needed and right now, they only go together one way...)

If anyone else has run into this, or has any deas of where else I could
look for info, I'd greatly appreciate it!