Windows 7 - Windows 7 WIA Driver needed Epson Scanner cause network workaround

I have a WorkForce 610. When I try to run the Epson Scan program
I receive an error message telling me that I need a WIA driver.

Yep, lots of those bugs out there.

While I can work around this issue on my Workforce and
have done so in the past, it did not occur to me until
today what the problem is with Windows 7 and these
scanner issues.

I had previously removed the network access to my
Workforce 610 which restored the driver issue. On
Saturday October 15, I decided to reinstall the scanner
drivers and try to get it working over the USB cable
which is the way I want it set up.

AS I was installing the driver, I noticed that the scanner
driver gave me an unsigned driver error message. As
installed and uninstalled the driver, I decided to run the
scanner setup.exe after the printer driver had been
installed and the system was searching for the printer.
When the warning message came up, I clicked the
install driver anyway button, after the driver had
finished installing, I plugged the machine in and allowed
the system to load the drivers after which everything
worked. I was able to run Epson scan with no problems.
That is, no problems until after I rebooted the system.

The reason Windows 7 won't load the scanner driver is due
to the fact that the scanner is not digitally signed. Both
Microsoft and Epson are at fault with this. Epson for failing
to purchase the needed digital signature, and Microsoft
for not providing a white list for unsigned drivers that the
user or admin knows is from a valid and trustworthy
organization. But then, such a white list would cause
companies to refrain from purchasing the digital signature
from Microsoft. In a nutshell, this is more of a money
grab by Microsoft than it is a concern on the part of Microsoft
for the security of your system.


So how do we get past this digital signature issue.
First, if your machine has network capability and
you have a home network, all you need to do is:

1. setup the networking configuration on the machine
and access it from their.
2. insure that the Epson scan settings are set to network
and your device.

Once these two steps are followed, you should be able to run
Epson scan without a problem.

Workaround two is to disable the digital signature requirement
in Windows 7. Here are some links to do so.

Permanently disable driver signature enforcement on Win 7 x64

Driver Signature Enforcement Overrider 1.3b

How to I turn off digital signature? - Microsoft Answers

The third thing you can do is contact your scanner manufacturer
and demand that they release a digitally signed driver for the
scanner like they should have done in the first place.

Scott A. Tovey