'Bad experience with scanners' pretty much sums the situation up.
Things to try:
Check that you user is in the 'operator' group. do this by reading the /etc/group file . Your user should be included in a line like this:
Code:
operator:*:5:root,borgibo
Again, applying changes in /etc/group is another thing I am not sure of: Logging out should do it.
ugen is the generic USB driver: any USB device that does not have a driver gets that. It provides access to the raw data streams to use processes. I think that the usb libraries used with sane are quite happy talking to a ugen device - if you have tried to load a kernel module for your scanner, you have not succeeded. If it is working as root, though, you have no problems with the driver.