'twas fun and games when XP was released and the several of the scanner suppliers either didn't release drivers, or were slow in delivering them
Mustek and Scansoft were both guilty
I had to create a series of batch files which changed the reported version of Windows in the registry to Windows 2000, installed the drivers and then changed it back to Windows XP
So....a batch file which edited
\HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Product Name to "Windows 2000 Professional", then ran the setup, and then reverted the registry change. I needed two versions of the file for each scanner....one for XP Home and one for XP Pro.
There was nothing wrong with the actual drivers....except they wouldn't run if the reported version was XP.
I haven't tried it in years, but I wonder if the same trick could be played on Win7 using XP drivers?