Mum’s laptop has a history of troubles after being “seen to” by a local computer repair service. One of the remaining problems is the scanner, which doesn’t install. It’s a xerox 2400 and the software is junk (don’t bother with the web site; it’s a slightly old model and they don’t list anything but the latest, sigh). I tried to get it to install both with the supplied CD and the latest drivers downloaded from the support site. Both produced the mysterious error, “The required section was not found in the INF. file.”
Of course, instead of googling for this message first as I should have done, I detoured to sysinternals.com and downloaded regmon and filemon to work out what was going on. Needless to say, this produced nothing, although I did notice a logfile, setupapi.log which seemed to contain slightly more information.
Finally, googling for <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+required+section+was+not+found+in+the+INF.file%22”>”The required section was not found in the INF. file.” produced an answer on a site called Visioneer. And it turns out that the Xerox scanner isn’t a xerox scanner after all; it’s a rebranded Visioneer model. But they do have a support page detailing the registry adjustments you need to make to fix the scanner install. I’d like to link to that, but their web site is so bad you don’t want to go there. Use the google cached <a href="http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:HATTkz7V-AwJ:www.visioneer.com/support/general/FAQ/RequiredSection.asp%22The+required+section+was+not+found+in+the+INF.+file%22&hl=en&client=firefox-a”>copy instead.
Anyway, the thing finally installed and I am now confronted with the true awfulness of “PaperPort” and “Xerox OneTouch” which need to be abused (configured is too light a word) into behaving like sane programs. I think my chances of getting the email button on the scanner to launch Thunderbird are slim to say the least.
Jabbering Giraffe 