THANKS SO VERY VERY MUCH TO EVERYONE!!!!!!!!! Your help and dedication in following this thread, and its variants, since the beginning of August, is so GREATLY appreciated!!! I now know considerably more about my system than I ever could have without such a peevish problem. In a way I'm glad I didn't 'go around the bend' earlier. I certainly wouldn't have learned as much. Yet, going around the bend is exactly what solved the problem. Unfortunately, we'll never know what the 'real' cause of the problem was. As you could tell with my last few e-mails, I just lost it. I hate working in windoze with such a passion, that 2 days without my SuSE was extremely toooo much. I formatted and repartitioned the entire drive(which was a good thing to do anyway, because I was in need of changing partition sizes). I then reinstalled fresh from cd's(apparently you too, Basil!), and tried my modem. Oh gad!!! I was still having dns problems. I then took a look at the preprogrammed init string my modem was using. Wow, how screwy! It was preprogrammed to use something extremely foreign. I then tried a very simple init I had tried before, init1: ATZ, init2: AT&F1. That got me back to the point where I could properly connect. On my first test I was expecting to be dropped at the usual max time of 59.4 minutes. As I reached 60 minutes, I started celebrating. As my connection time continued, I started downloading KDE updates. I was able to stay connected for 5 hours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just like I had been in 'that other os'. Ran another test and kept downloading. Again, 5 whole hours, before my ISP dropped me!!!!!!!!!!!! (I'll deal with them later, he says with an evil grin!) 5 hours!!!!!!! WOW!!!!!!!!!! Well, now you know what I've been doing ALL this week!! I've been making use of my new found connection time. It has taken me a while to set up all that I wanted of the kde updates, so kmail was out until this evening. I surely wasn't going to go through windoze to e-mail you guys back. 941 e-mails later, I'm finally able to respond. ************************************************** YOU GUYS ARE SUPER!!! NOWHERE ELSE ON EARTH COULD I FIND TECH SUPPORT THIS GOOD, AND SOOOO DEDICATED AT HELPING OUT, AT ANY PRICE!!! THANK YOU ALL!!! ************************************************** Yours so very sincerely, Bernd -- "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." Antoine de St. Exupery