Practical, trouble-free, easy usage: Epson CX 5400 all-in-one?

I'm on the lookout for a replacement printer/copier/scanner.
My HP PSC 750 stopped scanning (or rather, the software
on the PC stopped communicating with the PSC). A perusal
of my local newsgroup shows that the Epson CX 5400 is a good
contender. Can anyone provide anecdotes on it? I had real
problems with the PSC software after formatting my hard drive
with NTFS rather than FAT32. Apparently, the software chews
up way more memory when used under NTFS, and insufficient
memory was blamed as the source of noncommunication with the
PSC (even though I disabled all auto-started apps using
msconfig). This burned up at least a week in time to
troubleshoot, together with HP support. In the process, many
system registry settings have had their permissions opened up
to all, in an irreversible way. One could say that I'm a tad
disappointed, considering that the unit has hardly been used
in my near-2-years of ownership (I'm only halfway through my
first batch of 500 sheets of paper).

After that experience, needless to say, one of the
criteria I'm looking for is nonflakiness in the software's
support of Win2K under NTFS. Has anyone found this to be
the case with the Epson CS 5400?

Further, does it have a small foot print? Surface space in my
situation is scarce real estate, so that is another consideration.

What about flexibility to export to PNG or the like? Or overall
color fidelity? Is the color fidelity maintained as the unit ages?

About my needs, I do some office-quality printing/scanning/copying.
Most of it is line-art, but some is not. I do not do photographic
quality artwork.

Thanks for any comments.

Fred