[pattybaer]

Lately, my internet connection has been crashing. What happens is, the screen seems to change. It has the same web page look to it after changing, but it looks like a dummy screen. For example, the minimize, maximize and close at the top right look elongated, the screen just looks a little different, but the same. Ok, then no more web pages can be brought up (I get the page cannot be found, try to refresh, white screen). Email has an error at the bottom (Outlook Express). So, for all practical purposes, I am offline. I cannot access anything on the internet. However, my phone line is still in use. When I pick up the phone, I hear the noise. Also, my internet dialer will show the connect button as enabled, and hang up is disabled, yet it will not let me "reconnect" (clicking connect at this point does nothing). If I right click on the tray icon for the internet connection, and try to see "status", it flashes and then doesn't display the status. I had emailed Dell about this, and they suggested getting a new modem (56k), which I did, and this did not solve the problem. I called my ISP, they made the suggestion to make a new shortcut to dial from, which I did, but that did not help. They cannot really help me much anyway, since I cannot be on the phone with them and online at the same time (don't have a cell phone to use to call them). I have checked for virsuses, and come up clean. This has been going on for about a month now.