I can go with the noisy line one, as I had a week or two of dropout and difficulty connecting, but if other machines are connected to the same line, shouldn't be that. Unless the connection in the house is duff to that one machine. Other possibility is dialer. Get WinPatrol and click on 'Current Tasks' and see what is running. I also recommend BHO Demon to check on browser helpers. (SmartShopper can be deactivated with this - that little nasty can even prevent you getting into My Computer and My Documents!) WinPatrol also tells you when something is installing itself - more useful to you in the future, I know, but it's well worth having. I put it on machines I'm cleaning up, along with Demon, SpyBot and AdAware. (Have just finished one where they hadn't updated AV for 3 years. 11 Trojans, 807 Critical Objects, about 40-50 things in SpyBot, and we could do nothing until Demon had disabled SMRT! About the only thing they didn't have was CoolWeb.)