Corruption is a general term for anything wrong on the computer. Wrong in the sense that a particular application or service does not opperate like normal when set back to the defaults or reinstalled. In your scenario the computer is most likely relying on some other scanner driver or scan software that is misinterpereting the information sent from the printer. Hard to say exactly what the cause could be, Windows updates could be one of many culprits. Without a specific error message or log file to go off isolating the true cause is going to be very difficult.
You now are saying that the HPtech could not complete the reinstall, something a little different than before. If you have an error message for us then please share it via a screenshot or a written description of the error. HP keeps an installation log somewhere around C:\Users\<userId>\appdata\local\temp. If you organize this folder by date modified you should be able to see a few HP***.log files that may have more information.
Otherwise you might want to try installing this printer on an alternative computer for comparison. If you can install the printer software correctly on a different computer then you could have some confidence that reformatting the primary computer would resolve the corruption.