Scanner not recognized

[countryboy]

I have a Primax 600p scanner that worked fine until I upgraded to WinXP. I was using Win98 SE while it was working fine. The scanner is a parallel port scanner and my printer plugs into the scanner and the scanner into the printer port. I found that not only did the scanner not work in WinXP but mycomputer kept crashing, so I uninstalled XP and reinstalled Win 98. I tried unplugging both the scanner and printer and uninstalling the printer but when I power up only the printer is recognized and when I go to device manager the scanner is not listed, nor is there a yellow ? for other device. I checked both the Win.ini and System.ini and both are listed as archive files and not read only as someone told me might cause this problem if it said read only. I have a 20 gig hard drive and 276 meg of memory installed. I am of the opinion that some of the registry files of XP are still in my system and this is causing the problem. Can anyone give me an opinion on how to solve this, other than doing a full format of my hard drive and reinstalling Win 98. Thank's for any suggestions provided.