I created the soft link as you described but the scanner still hung, but for a much longer time before displaying the error. But it hung nonetheless.
I plugged it into a USB port and here's the output of
lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 058f:6377 Alcor Micro Corp. Multimedia Card Reader
Bus 002 Device 006: ID 03f0:052a Hewlett-Packard
Thanks -