> > (I don't think we've heard back from the original poster (Sciortino?) > since making our suggestions.)
I've been listening intently and learning a great deal. Thanks to all who've been helping me out. My progress so far: I've pretty much eliminated the possibility of an IRQ conflict between the mouse and the modem. The jumper setting on the sportster are for com2, IRQ3. The BIOS setting for serial A is com1, IRQ4. I've also taken David's great diagnostic tip and checked /proc/interrupts while moving the mouse with pppd down, and while not moving the mouse while something is downloading. All evidence appears to indicate that they are not on the same interrrupt. Now I'm trying running with gpm shut down. This seems to be giving me _much_ higherreliability. I'm not totally comfortable with this solution, since it seems like the problem should be some sort of hardware conflict. I checked out whether this was X dependent. With gpm up, the serial port crashes in lynx running from a non-x console too. (though x was still running on console 7) I'll keep you posted. If I don't have another crash over the next few days, I'll post the good news. It all seems very strange since my serial settings seem to be pretty vanilla. Thanks again. Best regards, Jeff -- To try many things and succeed in a few is success. -Elbert Hubbard