I took the advice of one of today's hints and opened the console only to see a line that read:
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718marching down the screen. A quick google search later and I was at rentzsch.com, where I found this as part of a discussion of the Canoscan software that comes bundled with Canon scanners (one of which - a LIDE20 - I bought recently):
Two background processes, N067U_ButtonManager and N124U_ButtonManager are started and placed into a boot-time launch folder. N067U_ButtonManager writes "Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717" to system.log once per second. N124U_ButtonManager also writes "Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718." This happens all the time, regardless of whether the scanner is plugged in or not. That means these two processes will write out around 10 megabytes of log files every 24-hour period.Sure enough, there they were in the Process Viewer, so I killed them. Can't tell if my system is faster, but I sure don't need hundreds of megabytes of useless system logs.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030601001541548