Scanning from HP scanner to Acrobat Pro 9

I have been using Acrobat Pro 7 with the HP 5550c scanner for years. After upgrading to Acrobat Pro 9, scanning documents to PDF has become more complicated and less flexible. It seems that Acrobat 9 hijacks the HP Scanning software.

In Acrobat 7 "Create PDF from scanner" sent me right into the HP Scanning software where I could crop the page, select resolution, adjust colors, or select b & w and adjust b & w threshold, etc. etc., while watching these changes take place live in the "Preview" mode, then proceeded straight away to create the PDF with these adjustments.

By comparison, in Acrobat 9 the "Create PDF from Scanner" gives me the Black & White, Grayscale, Color and Custom options, but nowhere does it allow you to crop or fine-tune the image in real time as is possible in the HP Scanning software. Is this done on purpose?

The only alternative I found was to scan the document using the HP Director (with all necessary adjustments) into HP Photo and Imaging as a TIFF first, then convert the TIFF to PDF. I found no setting in HP Director that would allow me to change the target file format from TIFF to PDF.

Am I missing a step somewhere?

Anyone with any suggestions?

[Windows XP Pro SP3]