Weekends on Hiatus for Now

Hello folks -- Herriman Saturdays and Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics are on hiatus for the time being. My scanner is on the fritz and I've run out of backlog scans for these features. Weekday features can continue unabated long into the future because I have oodles of scans waiting in the wings.

If you happen to be a good troubleshooter, I'm hereby soliciting ideas on how to fix this !@#$% thing. The specific situation is actually that the scanner works just fine if I hook it up to a different computer. But the one that I use for maintaining the blog, and which has Photoshop and all my other tools on it, just can't seem to recognize it all of a sudden. The computer recognizes it when I plug the USB cable in (I get the familiar ding), but when I try to make a scan nothing good happens. If I attempt to scan through Photoshop, Photoshop becomes unresponsive. If I try to scan directly through the Epson software, the application starts, displays it's splash screen, and then just shuts down. I tried reinstalling the Epson scanner driver and scanning application, and in test mode it says it finds the scanner. But no go when I actually try to scan.

I don't recall anything out of the ordinary happening around the same time,  like installing new apps or hardware. Oh, and other USB devices continue to work normally. I'm on XP with current service packs and updates.

Any ideas??