Nikon Scan 4 and Snow Leopard

My dad switched to an iMac a couple of weeks ago. He came from a Windows environment with lots of periferals (RF Mouse, Bluetooth dongle, HP flatbed Scanner, Espon printer, Nikon CoolScan V, HP PDA, etc.). So the challenge was to migrate as many periferals as possible.

Thankfully, most of them worked. Even the old Nikon CoolScan V film scanner worked with the supplied Nikon Scan 4 software, until last Sunday. For some reason the application crashes with a message that the preferences file can't be read (Is another instance of Nikon Scan 4 running??).

It seemed that the Nikon app wasn't shut down properly on one occasion and a lock file was left in the preferences. Removing the lock file solved the issue.
The lock file is located at the following location:

~/Library/Preferences/Nikon/Nikon Scan 4 Prefs.lock

Sidenote: Weird that relatively old propriatary software like the Nikon Scan 4 software works fine, but that more recent (Nikon) software needs special updates to keep working under Snow Leopard. Was Nikon Scan 4 written by people who understand what they were doing (OS sub-version independent)? Or is this just luck?

Update on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 21:30 by Willem

Eventhough the Nikon Scan software works in Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6), Nikon abandonned the support for Nikon Scan 4 a while back. Alternatively you could use SilverFast from LaserSoft (commercial software).