Epson RX 420 all in one

Hi. The printer bit works fine with CUPS. The scanner: is supported by iscan available from the kowa-epson site. On installing that version of iscan I get the error 'iscan depends on sane-backends'. I have sane installed. I force the rpm and fire up iscan: Could not send command to scanner I've uninstalled the sane package and compiled the sane-backends from the tarball but get the same error. Can anyone help me here? SuSE 9.2 YOU updated. thanks, Steve.