Sunday, May 20, 2012

Image Capture hangs at "Scanning", process pegs at 100% - ghost iPhone and dust removal

I've used my Epson V700 with Image Capture for years. Until today it's never had a problem.

Today it has a problem!

My scans are taking a very, very long time to complete. They seem to hang after the scan is completed, but after about five minutes they complete. It's as though something is timing out. In Activity Monitor the Epson Scanner Process is pegged at 100% CPU.

I switched to another account and the scan completed in seconds. So it's not hardware. It's something about my primary account.

A restart didn't fix it and deleting Image Capture preferences didn't help.

The problem started after several scans, so it's not related to a software install. The /private/tmp folder that Image Capture uses to cache its work seems fine.

Next up I'll try Onyx and clear out all my caches.

It's a weird one.

Update: I've identified one difference. On my primary account Image Capture thinks an iPhone is attached, even though it isn't. I found one other report of this in Snow Leopard and another here.

Update 2: I got rid of the "ghost" iPhone camera by removing all USB peripherals and restarting. That didn't help however. Scanning in my primary account is still far slower than scanning in my admin account. I even tried repairing permissions; as usual that made no difference. I started an Apple Discussion thread on this.

Update 6/9/2012: There were two issues. Removing the "ghost" iPhone did make a difference. The rest of the difference was dust removal. I was used to having it turned off. Turning it on really extends scan duration. Perhaps it's on by default and removing preferences enabled it?

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