After many boots without problems, suddenly it hangs when it gets to "Bringing up interface ppp0". I can Ctrl-Alt-Del out of it and reboot, then enter interactive mode and (Y) my way through till I get to where it wants to bring up ppp0. I answer No, then (C)ontinue to finish booting up--no problem. Then, when I start kde I can usually fire up kppp and get online, get my email, etc. Sometimes, though, I still get squirrelly performance with Konqueror and KMail. I'd like to be able to run kppp automatically in the background like with that, uh, other OS. Either way tho, I still prefer Linux!

Right, I'd hazard a guess that well, sounds quite obvious really, the ppp0 has been set to start at bootup, which it shouldn't do really. Well, you might want it to, but if it's just a normal dialup modem, that seems a bit odd. Look at

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0 (guess)

and you'll hopefully see a line that says

onboot=YES

change this line to NO, and reboot and there's a chance that everythign will be peachy

Thanks! That worked like a charm. Funny thing, I still don't know why I never had that problem until recently, nor what started it.

Here's another probably obvious one: do you have an idea why sometimes I keep getting kicked off my ISP? I'll be browsing in Konqueror, then I'll start getting error msgs like can't find whiny_newbie.com and have to log on again. After deleting /root/.kde/share/apps/kppp/kppp.pid, of course.
If I close everything down and reboot, the problem goes away.

A guess of mine:
Me and some friends of mine experienced the weirdest hangs and problems using kernel-based pppoE with 2.45-Kernels in SuSE. Might just be that you are using one of those in RH 7.1??

If so, try to use Roaring Penguin or something like that. Also to avoid having to start kpppd manually, have a look at diald, to have your internet-connection come up on demand.
Also you probably want to do a search on dial-on-demand on linuxdoc.org.

HTH, Steave.