Is the 3Com Professional Message Modem more usable in 7.3 than 7.2?

I was wondering what people's experiences were using their 3Com/US Robotics 56K Professional Message Modem in SuSE 7.3. In 7.2, with a success rate at around one-in-five, kppp can secure a useful connection as opposed to a time-out, whereas wvdial unfailingly produces unusable (i.e. dead) connections and "linux pppd [xxxx] Couldn't release PPP unit: Inappropriate ioctl for device" items in xconsole. Michael