Hi homerguy. Okay let us assume you already have a scanner. Now you want to know about scanning software.
The first thing you need is the twain driver. This is scanner specific and if you don't have the disks and things that came with the scanner you can most likely download the required driver. Just do a google search.
Next, you probably want some way of organising and viewing your scanned documents and pictures. There are a lot of different options here. I would recommend either Irfanview (
http://www.irfanview.com/) or Faststone image viewer (
http://www.faststone.org/).
With these types of programmes you can use them to run the twain driver to scan the image.
Lastly you may want to convert scanned documents back into editable text. For this you need an OCR (optical character recognition) programme. If you have office suite, look in your tools folder. You hopefully will find microsoft office document image/scanning which will alow you to scan a document and then convert the picture into a word document.
If my and the other responses don't answer your question, maybe provide a little more information, i.e. what type of scanner you have and what sort of scanning programme you are looking for.
What is the best free scanning software 