Red Hat 9 - new user

Linux Internet Connection using kppp

I had been connecting to the internet using a dial up connection to my isp and the kppp dialer. I had no problem with it once I got it configured, and have not changed the configuration (knowingly, that is). Today, it would not complete the connection, in that it was starting kppp and it timed out with a signal 15 - waiting for peer ("isp") to respond. This is the situation:
1. The modem dials the isp phone number
2. The kppp dialer waits for the user name prompt and sends the username.
3. The kppp dialer waits for the password prompt and sends the password.
4. The ISP sends the following message:
Starting ppp session. IP address 1.2.3.4. MTU is 101.
5. The kppp dialer says starting pppd, but it times out.

"Timeout expired while waiting for ppp interface to come up"
I have read the pppd man pages, though there may be some things that I am missing from reading it. I took a look at the log messages, and did not get any specific thing to look into.

Any ideas? I did notice some different logs from the ISP, namely, it used to prompt me with "login" and today it was prompting me with "Login". I fixed my configuration for that, but the ISP could not give me any insight into what other prompts I should expect, nor when the server is ready to connect a ppp session. I tried to ping the IP address that the ISP gave, but I received "network is unreachable".

Please help. I had to connect an old Pentium 100Mhz with Windows 2000 to connect to the internet (it took a half hour to install a modem I got for $1 a long time ago, and create a new connection. Why can't Linux at least this fast?)