I am about to build myself a pc and i am not sure what motherboard to choose. I will be using the pc for a lot of scanning and general word processing. My main remit is to allow the machine to be updated as neccessairy. Any Ideas on wht motherboard to buy?

'updated as necessary' isn't going to happen, unfortunately. There have been thousands of PCs sold with the 'future proof' tag, but they aren't. The technology world simply moves too fast.
The best you can hope for is a board that gives you half a gigabyte or more of potential memory (768MB) is the norm, and either a Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor path, which will probably allow you to plug in at least some of next year's processors when they arrive.
Performance hungry people are favouring the Athlon at the moment, but as to which board... it's a tough choice. Going for one of the good names - Gigabyte, Asus, A-Bit, etc., or Intel for the Pentium III - will give you some peace of mind and a few extra features. Have a look at www.motherboards.org for some useful reviews.

I bought an A-Bit Socket 370 board recently (takes the Celeron chip) and was happy to see that, despite there being no chip around at the time that ran that fast, it offered a 6.5x clock multiplier. The Celeron chip I bought with it, which I think was top of the range at the tiem (tho' still dirt cheap) was a 500, which I run at 575 because A-Bit boards are also good for overclocking.
So, in short, A-Bit boards are a good choice for upgrade as I'm sure you'll see at the motherboards website.
On a similar theme, does anybody know if the Pentium IV will use Slot 2? Or will Intel use the opportunity to introduce a new 'technology upgrade'?