Vuescan recently saved me when I was trying to get my first scanner to work, simply by actually managing to scan. That way, I knew that at least the scanner wasn’t broken, and I simply needed to figure out what was wrong (turns out the Canon driver hates it when your Windows region does not match your language and number formats…). After getting the original software to run, I didn’t need Vuescan again, but I thought it was a cool tool.