Xsane problem

[John Thompson]

Running Fedora8 64-bit, xsane cannot access my USB scanner when invoked 
as a mortal user. The "scanning for devices" pop-up appears and persists 
without finding anything until I kill it manually. Curiously, 
sane-find-scanner has no problem finding the device when run as a 
mortal user:

[john at lancre ~]$ sane-find-scanner 

  # sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the
  # result is different from what you expected, first make sure your
  # scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer.

  # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make 
  # sure that you have loaded a kernel SCSI driver for your SCSI 
  # adapter.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04b8 [EPSON], product=0x0101 
[Perfection636]) at libusb:001:009
  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be 
  # supported by SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

"scanimage -L" run as a mortal user does not find anything, but run as 
root it does:

[root at lancre ~]# scanimage -L
device `epson:libusb:001:009' is a Epson Perfection636 flatbed scanner
device `net:localhost:epson:libusb:001:009' is a Epson Perfection636 
flatbed scanner

If explicitly I tell scanimage to use the sane-epson backend ("scanimage 
-d epson" or setting "SANE_DEFAULT_DEVICE=epson"), it can operate the 
scanner even as a mortal user, but xsane still cannot find it even with 
"SANE_DEFAULT_DEVICE=epson" set. I have not managed to connect to the 
network device at all using either scanimage or xsane, but I can telnet 
into port 6566 so xinetd seems to be launching saned:

[john at lancre ~]$ telnet localhost 6566
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.

[root at lancre ~]# ps aux|grep saned
saned    25183  0.0  0.0  32544   960 ?        Ss   16:30   0:00 saned
root     25189  0.0  0.0   6052   580 pts/3    S+   16:30   0:00 grep saned

How can I fix this so I can run xsane as a mortal user again?

-- 

John (john at os2.dhs.org)