To be honest I'm not the sort of person that minds if a picture is a little grey in the background, I just don't like having to scroll for miles to get from one side to the other (since I can't stand the "auto resize" function on IE, it craps everything up).
Try scanning at a lower DPI (I find about 80 or 90 is close to life size) and crop off the bits of picture that don't have anything in them - Paint will do that for you, just grab the image resizing handles on the sides of the picture... as in: the one with the red scribbles is just me saying "If it was me, I'd get rid of all this extra space, as it doesn't do anything to the picture". The other one is how I'd present it - I think it's about 50% smaller, and cropped so you can see the whole image without having to scroll all over the place looking for the focus.
I mean, a little bit of pale grey in the background I can handle, ten-minute downloads to see a picture that's mostly empty space I tend to lose patience with.