Anybody remember Rube Goldberg? He was the guy who made the cartoons that showed a bunch of stuff connected together to acheive a simple task. (click here if you're interested in seeing his work: http://www.rube-goldberg.com/html/gallery.htm )

My solution to my modem problem is like something Rube Goldberg would have come up with. My modem works fine the first two or three times I connect to the internet. But then, when it connects it can't "see" the provider, so it's like it doesn't really connect. What I have to do is reboot, remove the modem using the device manager and then let device manager look for the modem and reinstall the drivers. I now have a batchfile in my startup group that does exactly that.
So, every third or fourth time I want to connect to the net, I have to reboot, go off somewhere for a few minutes while my computer goes through this process, and then sit down at the computer and connect. To me, Windows XP is such an improvement over Windows ME, which my computer came with, that it's worth the hassle. One of these days I'm going to try to reinstall Windows XP from scratch to see if that fixes the problem.