I've not used technical support either, the only problems I really had were
using free discs to join an ISP, in both cases these overrode my existing dial up/ email settings. So now I use the manual set up option when connecting to a new ISP, it isn't that difficult and any problem you might be ringing the support line about can often be traced back to those settings. When my email is 'acting up' I often find that one of the settings has been corrupted somehow and it is easy to sort out if you have a list of the correct settings - I seem to think FreeUK had an easy to use explanation of how to manually set up an account.