CS3 crash from twain thread

I am using Photoshop CS3/Windows in an XP/SP2 environment with 4GB of memory (not all recognized by XP). My slide scanner is a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000, and scanning usually proceeds smoothly, but every few times I use it, it fails.

The failure mode is irritating. I will typically have scanned 8 or 10 slides, and from the active scanner window I can see the scanned images stacking up in the Photoshop window underneath. Then I close the scanner window, and the Photoshop window closes too, giving me no opportunity to save the accumulated scans.

The same problem arose a few times during my use of the beta version.

Is this a known problem?

Twain is useful when you need to scan just one image, which you are going to work on straight away. When scanning a batch of slides, however, best practise is to have the scanner save the files directly to disk as TIFFs.

If you are scanning at a fairly high resolution, imagine the strain you are putting on your system. With the open files, Photoshop and your scanner software all vying for the available memory, there will be a great deal of paging to Virtual Memory, not to mention scratch disk activity.

I'm sure that's good advice, and I'll follow it, but I'd expect that my prior practice (scan to Photoshop) might cause applications to slow, but not to break.

(Actually, it doesn't even cause appreciable slowing in the way I'm doing it. I am going through thousands of old slides, collecting just a token scan (~ 5MB) of each one, so a few such scans don't impose much of a load. I don't disagree with your main point, of course.)