Distro: Mandrake 10.0 Community

Please help! I'm pretty new to Linux and am trying to get dialup networking going. I thought I had it nailed--I got kppp to make a successful dialup connection yesterday running as root, and then I was working using some postings to try to get non-root users to be able to dial out. I did the following to try to get this to work:
- I created a dialout group, added the user account to it, and assigned the group to kppp
- I edited /etc/pam.d/kppp to have auth sufficient for pam_stack.so service=system-auth

When I started testing dialout under the non-root user account, clicking the Connect button in kppp just causes kppp to hang and the entire KDE session to go down after a while, even if I terminate the kppp executable. I couldn't even shutdown the system cleanly (had to power down). After rebooting and file system checking, I went back and tried to test kppp under root from the terminal (after issuing su). It also crashes on clicking Connect in the same way.

I removed the kdenetwork-kppp-3.2.15mdk package and reinstalled it, but I get the same behavior. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks so much. If there's any permissions I need to set, please be very explicit with the commands because I don't understand Linux file permissions well yet.

One other question--do I need to disable eth0 somehow before making a dialup connection? I've read that somewhere. If so, how do I do that? Thanks again.