Scanner death?

My Microtek Scanner looks like it's on its last legs. I really should have returned it years ago and got an Epson, but I wanted the SilverFast software that came with the Microtek.

I bought the first one online, which was faulty and returned for a refund. I bought the second one from a local supplier but that was faulty too. After spending an hour in the shop with their tech guy and with Microtek support on the phone, I agreed to install new drivers and see if that helped. It didn't, but then I realised that I wasn't using the film holder correctly. The end of the film was going over the 'calibration area' and messing up the scanners calibration. Something that Microtek support failed to diagnose. So after 6 weeks or so, I had a working scanner.

But there were still problems:

You can't scan the middle frame from a strip of 3 frames of 120 using the supplied film holder. 

The scanner would shift the selected scan area between the pre-scan and the scan itself. Effectively, the scanner would 'miss' the target.

Sometimes, colour scans would have a 3 pixel band of RGB through the middle. Not very often, just occasionally, at random.

Dust got inside and found its way onto the inside of the glass.

It started going clunk clunk clunk. Then one day it went clunk clunk clunk eeeeeeek and stopped. I opened it up, found the problem, cable clips catching on the scan head, fixed it and cleaned the glass at the same time.

More dust got in.

Despite the 3200x6400 dpi resolution, there was no more resolution delivered at anything over about 2400 dpi. Just bigger slower scans.

And now this: Strange banding across the scans.

I'm now trying, like everyone else it seems, to decide between an Epson V500 or a Canoscan 8800F. I'm tempted by latter as it's £60 cheaper...