We recently had a client having an issue with the ScanSnap Home software crashing on startup giving a nearly useless “Unexpected error has occurred” message.
No codes, nothing useful, only suggesting to uninstall and re-install the application.

The initial tech working on this did exactly that, even throwing in some reboots.
No change.

It was passed to me and I found an article about it on Fujitsu’s site, and it said they are aware of it and there is no fix.
Great.

Well I’m not satisfied with an answer like that, especially since this was working on other peoples PCs and nothing else was wrong.
There was nothing recently changed, and no updates recently applied, so that ruled out a lot.

I waited a minute and was able to click the “OK” button on the error and the app loaded, but couldn’t access the scanner.
I went to preferences and go an error saying it couldn’t open the preferences file.
Something useful!
This suggested either with the permissions or file corruption.

Since I already put in a lot of time I had to apply a shotgun blast approach.

I uninstalled the ScanSnap software
I cleared out/renamed the following folders (I don’t remember the names, sorry, PFU is a common name though):

• C:\ProgramData\anything ScanSnap/Fujitsu related
• C:\Program Files (x86)\anything ScanSnap/Fujitsu related
• C:\Program Files\anything ScanSnap/Fujitsu related
• C:\Users\%username%\Appdata\(local AND roaming)\anything ScanSnap/Fujitsu related

I re-installed the app, and it worked!
The only part that was annoying after that was that I had to remove the old scanning profiles as it created new ones when I re-installed.

I renamed the folders instead of clearing them in case they contained data the client might need.
It’s a habit of mine I’ve gotten into and I suggest anyone reading this do the same!
It can always be cleaned up at a later date.