Mac Forum / General / General / August 2006

First thing on the screen after login was a complaint of "unable to
connect to device" with a picture of a camera on it.  This sits in front
of any other windows.  It further advises "check the I/F cable ..." and
to turn the device off, then on, then try again.

Clicking the OK button does nothing (not even a flicker).

'top' in Terminal shows that 10% to 20% (goes up and down)
of the CPU is sucked up by
/System/Library/Image
Capture/Devices/TWAINBridge.app/Contents/MacOS/TWAINBridge

Killing that removes the complaint dialog.

'ps -aujxx' reveals the PPID is the windowserver, the process
owner is me.  The sequence of PIDs suggests a connection with
the "Brother," which is a multifunction fax/copy/scan/print.
I have never had a digital camera hooked to this Mac, but also
I haven't scanned anything on the Brother in months.

Logged out and into my son's account - he gets it too.
Same for the admin account.  So it's not a per-user
login item.

Brother.com has a technical question feedback form--which
does not work.

System.log shows that the last four logouts got an error from
TWAINBridgem but no other clues.  The earliest such error was
when my son logged out right before I logged in and saw this
the first time.

He remembers no actions to explain it.  Looked over his websurfing
history, and saw nothing seeming like a possibility.

I could write a cron script to kill 'TWAINBridge' but I'd much
prefer to learn what started this, how to stop it, and how to
prevent it.

Sound familiar to anyone?

(I'm hunting through Google for "TWAINBridge"
Many hits but so far, no help)