Thanks to all who helped me to get my 1650 scanner working. I had wanted to report what what I did that fixed it, but I seem to be unable to break the functionality by backing out the fixes that I installed.
Suggestions that I applied tha seemed helpfull were: adding "options scanner vendor=0x4b8 product=0x110" to /etc/modules.conf. Commenting out the scsi line in /etc/sane.d/epson.conf (I had already enabled the usb line). Editing /etc/hotplug/usb.distmap so that one of the scanner entries matches the vendor and product identification of the 1650. These changes allowed scanimage to work, identifying the 1650 as" device `epson:/dev/usb/scanner0' is a Epson GT-8200 flatbed scanner XSane was not able to find the scanner, so I tried running yast2 (a configuration utility in the SuSE distribution). This identified the scanner and offered to configure it. XSane subsequently functioned of, but I was left to wonder how that was accomplished. I believe that the trick was to create /dev/usbscanner and change the epson.conf file to reference it instead of /dev/usb/scanner0. Yast2 aslo modified /etc/sane.d/dll.conf to comment out all backends except epson. A subsequent attempt to use the scanner with Red Hat 7.3 also worked with scanimage but failed with XSane. This was solved by downloading and installing xsane-0.88. Thanks again for the great support. Dave
