I’ve been using some nice Photo software and a nice Canon scanner dating from the early 2000s (XP) on this much later but still aged W7P laptop. I use them because their facilities are faster and easier to use than current “free” offerings, and it would cost me thousands to upgrade to something new and “better”.
Suddenly today Photo Premium said it could not find the twain_32 scanner driver, but the scanner still worked with the most basic applications, clearly the driver worked. Alas these simple apps lack the very clever facilities I needed for a neatly tweaked scan.
After an hour of fruitless searching on the net, and trying reinstalling drivers etc, I came across one of the oldest, simplest tricks in the book, so old I’ve not used it since the DOS days: the “Path” environment variable.
I added the driver’s location to the “Path” e-v (last edit 2015) and presto! it all works again.
But why did it break?
This PC is so old it has not had any new software or system updates in ages apart from Norton and Firefox. Surely they’ll not fiddle with heavily protected innards like M$ drivers?
Norton definitely has its moments and can cause havoc! Microsoft Defender would be my choice but whether it updates on Win 7 is another question?
If you were looking to run your scanner on newer PC hardware I’d highly recommend Vue Scan from hamrick.com. The pennies you’d save from Norton would buy you a license which will last for years and years.
If you really need to run older software on an out of support OS I would do it in a virtual machine that you don’t permit internet connection to (or at least if you must let it go online you can simply roll it back if [when] it becomes compromised).