Actually had to make a special trip to Goodwill to rummage around for a standard USB A->B cable. I couldn't believe it, but every single USB cable I had turned out to be for mini or micro-USB.
Anyway, I finally got a late 90's Visioneer 7600USB scanner hooked up. The install procedure for Win2k and XP was a strange hack job, but once I found the necessary web page that described how to do it, it worked. The XP machines had some weird issues, but don't know if that's because of the OS or for other reasons.
On Win2k with an Intel 440GX + single P3-600E, the scanner works fine.
On WinXP with a VIA 694X + P3-933, the scanned images are fine at 300dpi and above, distorted at 200dpi, and distorted more insanely as the dpi gets lower than that.
On WinXP with my "modern" Phenom2 system, the scanned images were distorted, the scanner motor started making strange noises, the scanner locked up mid-scan, and the driver reported the scanner had become unresponsive. Try again after a reboot and it went crazy again.
Not sure what was up, but it's almost as if the scanner driver is speed sensitive. The scanner acted up so bad with the Phenom2 that it made me wonder if it had broken the thing. Maybe it just hates USB2.