HP OfficeJet 8010 Series says the scanner is in use when it's not

[Rhino397]

I bought a brand new HP OfficeJet 8015e Printer Scanner device and installed it on a Windows 11 PC.  I installed HP Smart as well. The printing functions worked fine, but the scanner kept giving me an error message "Scanner is in use, please try again later".  Of course the scanner was not in use.  

I read all the troubleshoot blogs written by HP Employees.  They all said the same basic things that did not solve the problem.  But when I looked at the device in HP Smart, two printer-Scanners show up.  That's because I connected it to my Wi-Fi network AND plugged in a USB cable.  I figured why not keep that traffic off my Wi-Fi when I'm using it with the local computer and have it send data through the USB instead, and when using another computer in the house, it could use Wi-Fi.  This doesn't cause a problem with my rather old HP 5660e all-in-one, so I thought it would be fine with a much newer machine.  

Wrong.  

Once I unplugged the USB cable and hid the USB copy of the 8015e, the scanner immediately began working perfectly.  The moral of the story ... with this machine, you MUST choose one interface or the other, not both!  HP needs to look into this and make a firmware change to resolve it, but until then, just use USB OR Wi-Fi, but not both.  HP Smart really isn't all that smart, apparently. 

I am not an HP Employee.