Well, my 'work around' for my Scanmate was similar to this (as link in my previous post):
With the imminent demise of Microsoft support, you could keep your eyes peeled for a cheap XP machine, and just use it to run the scanner. Transfer scanned files to your newer machine with a USB stick. So long as it never goes near the internet, there's little need to keep it updated SO LONG as you AV check the memory stick before swapping from one to the other.
I use my old XP machine purely to control the scanner. I can network it directly to my other machine running Windows 7 and I scan directly to this via ethernet. I'm being mindful of security and I don't connect the XP machine to the internet.
I knew SD would be along!