HP software prob

Starters: I use the HP 1210xi AIO (all in one) scan/copy/print dealio.

Problem is this:

When I switched back to X in April (which was a great thing) I just plugged the printer in and went with it. No problems at all. Built in X drivers handled it like a champ.
A few days ago though, I wanted to scan something, and had to download the HP software to do it. Didn't mind too much, but now I've got a few problems.
1) the dumb thing starts up and places itself in my dock (not just as a running program, but it actually puts itself in my dock) everytime i start up. i don't see anything in my startup folder. very annoying.

2) it's been eating up all of my available CPU! today, things were moving a little sluggish, so I opened the activity monitor to see if it was ram or CPU - and wouldn't you know it, between myself and my wife (who forgot to log out), the HP communications center was eating up every last ounce of CPU. once I force quit her instance of it, mine shot up to over 50% CPU.

so my question is, does anyone have experience with this? I'm not sure what all I need to delete so that I can maintain the ability to scan (also, w/o it putting it into its stupid pic manager program), but use the standard OS X drivers for printing. this is crazy annoying, and i'd love to be able to continue using it like before, w/o having to just never use it for scanning again.

*sigh*

any thoughts?

emac 1.0 256 megs, 10.3.4

matt