slide scanns with epson perfection 3200 gt 9800

[supernova666]

Hi all!

I am looking for a way to get slide scanns (positives) done. What i 
tried so far is XSane, IScan (which is some static linked binary tool 
from Epson for Linux) and Vuescan (a closed source scanning tool, 
commercial). I know i will not get any support for the closed source 
tools here, but since i could not find an exceptable workflow with open 
source, i would like to stress that i have tried them, too.

To get to the point: the problem is not the hardware itsself, but the 
workflow. If you need to get a whole slide film scanned (usually 36-38 
pictures here), you can not crop each picture by hand. I use 2 masks 
which came with the scanner : One is for mounted slides and eats 4 
pictures, the other one takes unmounted stripes, up to 12 pictures. The 
Window$ software from Epson detected the masks and croped automagically, 
where all the menntioned linux software expects me to do this manually. 
Somebody now would maybe advice me to edit the croplist in XSane but 
thats not a good idea, because if the stripes get shorter i.e. you need 
to make one entry for each stripe length.

I hope there is somebody out there who does a similiar job under Ubuntu 
and maybe has found a reasonable solution for that.

Greetings Swen