Finally! The scanner I bought, after much research and thinking and much temptation to spend £500, is the more reasonable Canon Canoscan 8600F. And here’s my first scanned slide, all the way back from 1988, at a market in Morocco…

To be honest this is my third scan of this slide since it actually had a few scatches. and i resized it a little as it was a bit too big for showing on a site…
If anyone is curious here is the scan file http://iphi.net/pics/photography/Scan10001.bmp - i did let the scanner do a medium amount of scratch correction, and here’s the first scan without any correction http://iphi.net/pics/photography/Scan10001_uncorrected.bmp . Both are 22Mb so download only if you are curious!
So far I am quite pleased with the canon software tool that came with it. It did a great job of detecting all 7 negatives on the 2 strips i put in, then scanned them all. With medium scratch/dust correction it took about 6 minutes per scan at 2400 dpi - I dont think i need to go that high for most of my slides. If you look closely you can see that it didn’t quite get the negative edges correctly, although I suspect that if I paid more attention putting the strips in and if i paid more attention when using the tool, I would get a better result.
I actually got a better result than with Silverfast SE which also comes with the scanner, but that could be wrong settings in SF. It insisted to scan only 600dpi so it was hard to compare. And it didnt have the scratch reduction tool, but again there might be a way.
I was told to give vuescan a try but vuescan didnt want to know about the 8600F just yet. oh well. in a few versions maybe.
Anyway, scanning tips and software suggestions most welcome