Scanner won't work under gimp

[Frank Miles <fpm@u.washington.edu>]

Hello...

I had to rebuild my home machine (hardware failure).  Since the rebuild (with Etch,
same as before), neither scanimage nor gimp seem to find my Epson/USB scanner.
Running
        sane-find-scanner
finds the scanner without any problem.  Running
        scanimage -L
hangs.  Turning on the debug environment variables SANE_DEBUG_DLL and SANE_DEBUG_EPSON
show that the scanner is found, but scanimage never exits (until I hit Ctrl-C).
If I explicitly specify the backend, scanimage works.  Otherwise it hangs.
I've provided the appropriate link to the scanner backend through the link
as recommended on the man page.

I'm guessing that what is lacking is a link or parameter setting somewhere that will
route gimp to the correct scanner backend.  Can anyone suggest where that might be?
(Many of the man pages seem out of date with the changeover to the temporary /dev
entries).

TIA!!

	-frank