MicroTek scanner drivers hose your boot drive!

Hoping an actual Apple person will read this and tell me how this should be handled. I've actually solved the problem with my own Mac, now I want to make sure the root cause is dealt with appropriately.

There is a hardware vendor, MicroTek, who makes scanners. I have one, model i700. The scanners seem to be good hardware with good features, but the software leaves lots to be desired--it's clunky, very un-Maclike, and fragile. Any minor problem or upgrade requires a ponderous cleanup of old files spread all over the system and a full reinstall.

I was hoping their latest software would improve things, so I downloaded version 7.61 from their website and did an install. Towards the end, when it was installing plug-ins (for PhotoShop, etc. I presume) my MacBook Pro gradually stopped responding and eventually ground to a halt. After waiting a long, long time for it to recover, I did a hard reset. Upon startup it just stuck at the grey screen with the spinning gear. Did some troubleshooting and couldn't recover, and since it was pretty similar to many a disk crash I've had, and AppleCare agreed, I sent it in for a new HD.

Since I still needed to do some scanning, I whipped out my backup PowerBook G4 and tried installing the same drivers. Boom. Same behavior. Now I have two dead machines, and it's pretty clear that the problem with the first one was NOT a bad drive after all but a driver install screwing up the OS. I reinstalled this Mac from scratch and tried again. Same thing. After a discussion with an incredulous support tech at MicroTek who was adamant that their software installer could do no such thing (and who eventually hung up on me), I did a search on these very forums and found a post from someone who had hosed their Mac by resetting permissions on their root filesystem.

So, I booted the Mac into single user mode (which worked) and checked out the filesystem. Sure enough--the entire directory tree from the root all the way down to the ScanMaker folder under Applications was set to the wrong owner, and permissions of 700, making the Mac incapable of accessing itself in order to boot. I fixed these up, and blam, it now boots fine. This behavior is reproducible every time. I've done it 5 or 6 times now on multiple Macs.

My question is this--how do I get the vendor to fix this problem? I've gotten around it myself, but this is a huge deal--anyone installing this thing is going to hose their boot volume and NOBODY is going to know how to fix it when it happens. Can Apple sanction these guys somehow, or do I need to slashdot them to embarrass them into it, or what?

Thanks for your input...

/mike