Modem won't disconnect!

[Mini-Me]

An interesting problem:

The modem refuses to disconnect.
The machine is a Dell desktop machine, about 3 weeks old. It was a discount-sale.
XP home SP2, Celeron 2.8GHz, 256MB RAM, CD-writer, FDD, 40GB HDD.

Modem is an internal Conexant one.
Will dial just fine, and connect just fine, but when you try to disconnect, the modem will not obey!
:p

This causes Outlook Express to fall over with fatal errors all over the place, as it will log into the e-mail account, check and download any mail, then try to auto-disconnect. The modem refuses to do this, and OE locks up, and will not respond to any clicks. You have to kill the app in task manager.

When I got to the guy's house, there was three copied of OE trying to run(all were not responding), and two copies of IE.(also not responding).
The system was locked so bad, that the start menu would not even come up, and I had to press the reset button...

Quite unusual for XP, as I find it is generally pretty good on stability...

Now, I'm kinda wondering if this fits the Dell problem charts?

Any comments?

There's no way that a machine that is only 3 weeks old, should ever be that unstable...


MM.

[jlreich]

Sounds like a driver issue to me. Try uninstalling the driver and rebooting, reinstall driver. Look for updated drivers at Dell's website first.

If that doesn't help you can go into OE options, connections tab, and untick "hang up after sending and receiving". That will at least stop the crashing until someone else pipes in with a better idea.

[classicsoftware]

An interesting problem:

The modem refuses to disconnect.
The machine is a Dell desktop machine, about 3 weeks old. It was a discount-sale.

This cries out for call to Dell's Award Winning Service and support. Since it's only three weeks old and most likely has only a 90 day warranty, I would call Dell.

[Mini-Me]

This is just an update for you all.

Latest issue was any attemp to run OE or make a new net connection failed(OE would fall over before it even finished loading, and the new connection simply failed to open).

Decided to roll-back the system to the point where it came from the factory using system restore.

That done, everything seems OK.
Dell help was not that helpful, so the guy decided just to have me fix it.

I now find out that the guy did make a failed attempt to install F-secure antivirus suite, and the install failed half-way though, although, I have no details about this...

Obviously, this seriously annoyed XP and OE in particular, so rolling back seemed to fix the issue. I installed the F-secure suite for the guy to make sure it was all up and running.

This is the end of this problem.
Just thought you guys might like to know this one is now solved...


MM.