Epson Perfection 3490 scanner works only as root

additional: worked until I upgraded to 8.04

more: it is a clean install of 8.04

I've downloaded all the drivers, packages, backends, and frontends available for this scanner and all its cousins and nothing has changed about the behavior.

launching sane from the gui results in a small window that appears then disappears almost immediately.

I've been through all the forums and answers, and the puzzling thing is that it is definitely just a permission problem. Going to the console, typing "xsane" returns "segmentation fault" - typing "sudo xsane" provides me with a dire warning, then sane runs just fine. Unfortunately, the resulting file output from the scanner has root only permissions, so I cannot even use the output unless I change permissions as root. It seems a long, complicated, round-about way to acquire an image -- it's almost simpler to reboot to Windows when I need to make a scan (ick!).

Even when it seems I'm on the right track, I'm told to change the permissions on a file or folder that doesn't even exist - I've even gone so far as to create the non-existent folders to no avail. It seems that most of the solutions apply to 7.04 or 7.10, but I've been unable to find any steps to get this scanner working under 8.04.

What permission or permissions do I need to change?