Hi I also purchased an HP photo scanner in July and had
exactly the same problem. I spent ages on the phone speaking to a
body in India who was unable to help. I had a look at the
installation CD and in the top level folder there are 3 .BAT files,
full, express and custom. I ran the full.bat and the installation
went smoothly. This installation I guess is without Macromedia as
the graphics appear much less clever.
The applications load OK but do seem a bit slow, still better
than nothing. Best of luck.