Strange twain driver issue

Brand new HP desktop, Vista home premium, set up one user account with admin
privileges on start up. I installed a 3 year old Cannon flatbed scanner with
the latest Vista 32 bit drivers downloaded from the Cannon site. The install
was successful but I was only able to scan from MS office apps Word, Excel,
PP, not in any programs using the twain drivers. Photoshop Elements 5.0.2
with the Vista patch and the Canon scanner software showed no twain devices.
The scanner drivers in the device mgr and control panel were all good.

Cannon tech support had me try various things with no results; selective
start ups with msconfig, un-installing, re-downloading, re-installing. Then
they had me create another admin user account and re-install the drivers. The
scanner worked, all programs could access the twain drivers, until I
rebooted, after that both admin users could not access the scanner, except
with the MS office apps. Cannon support said the problem was with user
account permissions and since it was a Vista issue they could not provide any
help.

Contacted HP support and received no help. Spoke with two different techs,
both were clueless about how to help and said it must be a diver issue and
would have to go back to Cannon for support. Cannon suggested that I dump and
re-load Vista, a ton of work and since the only backup is the recovery disk I
created after the initial boot up and the scanner was installed immediately
thereafter chances are the issue would still be there. Cannon rep claims they
have tested the drivers on all versions of Vista with many hardware
configurations and have had no issues and my problem is with my Vista
permissions only.

In the mean time I activated the hidden administrator account and the twain
drivers are fully functional in all programs, scanner works fine. I removed
the scanner drivers and re-installed through the hidden admin account and the
scanner is still unusable in the original user account. I have checked all of
the twain drivers for permissions and the original user account shows full
permissions.

There are no other twain devices on this system and no other twain devices
have ever been installed. Obviously I shouldn’t have to use the hidden admin
account to use the twain drivers but I can’t seem to find an answer to the
user account permission issue.

Cannon and HP support has washed their hands of this issue. Hardware is
cheap and I’d be tempted to go buy a new all in one, but I’m afraid that the
twain driver issue would still be there.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dan