D'oh !!! You fixed it.
Quick question: do you by any chance have "Stupid Mode = 1" in your wvdial.conf?
Well I didnt but I just added it to the provider file anyway and bobs your aunty it worked !! Out of interest where will I find documentation on the parameter "Stupid Mode" ?? thanks !!! dids
I had a problem a while ago where an ISP would only accept a connection one time in ten. It turned out that the problem was a timeout before ppp was started. Sometimes pppd was started before the timeout, most times it wasn't. With stupid mode it's started immediately.
If that's your problem you can get smpppd to work by adding STUPIDMODE=yes in your provider-file in /etc/sysconfig/network/providers (I haven't found a yast way of doing it yet).
regards Anders