Basil Chupin wrote: [The first part of my original message pruned] .....
(c) C Hamel and I have been corresponding privately and he mentioned earlier tonight that he found a "funny" about the KDE application "k3b".
As a test I re-installed Suse 9.1 with KDE Desktop, Multimedia, Games, plus a couple of other things I normally insall, BUT I deliberately omitted installing k3b.
After the full installation the modem was behaving almost normally with thruput again back to 4.4 - 5.9 Kb/s but with quite a number of slowdowns and stops. This degradation in performance could have been caused by the fact that in our part of the world at that time the Net is used pretty heavily. I will be retesting this during the day time (later today) to see if the performance is still below par.
In summary, something KDE-related is causing the problem with the modem(s) - and it may be possible that it is k3b.
[rest pruned] OK, I retested the above starting at 1327 hours East-coast-of-Australia time (0527 hours Berlin time) and the results were less than encouraging: the results were 1/3 of the way between DISASTER and WHAT I NORMALLY GET. The thruput was hovering on many occasions at the 1.4 - 2.8 Kb/s mark with the occasional peak of 4.4 Kb/s but also there were many zeros until finally the whole thing ground to a halt for a long time with total inactivity. Bottom line is that while there was a noticeable improvement from the "Can't use the modem under Suse 9.1" scenario the improvement is nothing to hold a parade about. Nevertheless, it does appear that removing k3b *may* have been of benefit <shrugs shoulders>. Cheers. -- I am not young enough to know everything.