a new kind of crash

[David Crump]

<snip1>
It's not normal! :-)

Do you have a Canon Scanner? Keep it connected to your computer. If
that doesn't help, check your 'Login' Preference Panel. Do you have 1 or
2 different ButtonManager Applications running? Keep the ButtonManager
with the same Model name as your scanner.
</snip1>
<snip2>
seems you have a CanoScan scanner driver installed (no unusual 
behaviour,
BTW).=20
Open System Preferences->Start up Items and deselect the Scan Button 
item
(probably n67x or 124x). That should do it.
</snip2>

That was it!  Thank you so much for your help.  I do have a Canon N670U 
Scanner, which I only plug in when needed.  I checked Login items, and 
there were two button managers in there (n067 and 124).  I removed the 
124, and plugged in the scanner to see this in the log:
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717
found my device (vendor = 1193, product = 8717)
Interface found.
Interface class 255, subclass 0
Interface has 3 endpoints.

Now, my next question:  Is this button manager necessary to be there 
for the scanner to work?  I think it's stupid for me to have that 
scanner plugged in all the time, as it is USB powered.  For the amount 
that I use it it would be a waste of power.  Could the constant 
searching for the item been a culprit in the instability of my system, 
or would it be mainly because it was searching for 2 different 
scanners?  If I recall correctly, I installed the OSX drivers for the 
scanner back around the time I upgraded to OS X.2, and these kernel 
panics started.
I'll let you know if I keep getting kernel panics.  Thanks for all the 
help.
Dave.