Comment 1 for bug 541580

It appears that the same problem has occurred with earlier versions of the 64bit OS. I am told that in later versions of kernel /proc/bus/usb will not be available. However, a workaround of sorts for this has been already found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/507824

The solution is as follows;

It is not a long term solution, but I found another solution, for getting /proc/bus/usb back again and no need for usbfs.

First I put my user to sudoers for /bin/mount and /bin/umount
Then I changed my scanner script to do the magic.

Before running my scanner the script will do:
sudo mount --bind /dev/bus /proc/bus

while on exit of the script it fires the command:
sudo umount -l /proc/bus

mount --bind /dev/bus /proc/bus or
mount --bind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
will make /proc/bus/usb accessible /proc/bus/usb for some hardware (although this will cause the other directories under /proc/bus to be hidden). So you should umount again, after use.

It is a reasonable workaroud and worked fine for me. Just should make sure to unmount after using the device otherwise /proc/bus/pci and /proc/bus/input etc gets hidden!