I've read that using wvdial is the easiest way to connect a dial up account using an external serial modem. Does Kubuntu 6.06 with KDE come with wvdial installed? Went to Add/Remove and it says yes but I can't seem to bring it up. Is there a deb. version available somewhere I could just download (have XP as a dual boot)?. I did find a tar.gz version but I not experienced enough yet to recompile source code. Thanks.

Here you can search for repositories with deb packages. http://apt-get.org/
Search for wvdial gives:
deb http://www.linex.org/sources/linex/debian sarge linex

You can try to add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list then run shell command
apt-get update
apt-get install wvdial

Wvdial probably will run as root. In kubuntu try "sudo wvdial".
You probably need to run wvdialconf first. Again, "sudo wvdialconf".

Kubuntu uses kde as gui. Wvdial (and wvstreams which you have to install first) are gnome gui apps. However, kde does have a pretty good modem dialer built-in. If you are going to use dial up, create a file /etc/kppp.allow and in that file, just list the users you want to access kppp. Then as a regular user, fire up kppp, configure, and you should be set to go.

I've always used wvdial from the command line. wvdial is not a Gnome GUI application.

EDIT: Link to some info.

Ok, my bad. I notice many distributions include wvdial/wvstreams nowadays, and procomplied versions are just a download away.

Not sure about Kubuntu, but Debian usually installs wvdial by default. From a terminal, type this command to configure it:
Wvdial will scan ttyS ports and if it finds a modem it will write a configuration file to /etc called "wvdial.conf". For my Debian, it did not find any the first run, but found it the second time I tried to write a configuration file. You have to use an editor to un-comment the three ISP information lines and add the relevant information, such as your user name, phone # and password. The start of these lines will have something like ";;" at the beginning, that has to be removed so the line starts with the right word like "Password", not ";;Password". Allot of times it is necessary to add a line as such:
To use wvdial once configured, just type "sudo wvdial" in a terminal to have it connect.
As stated above, wvdial is not a Gnome application, it is independant, and can be installed on any Linux/Unix with any desktop environment.
You can also install kdenetworks-kppp, it is a GUI ppp dialer, you may need to add a string of modem inits. in the modem commands init2 section as such:

The only thing not covered is that you use CTRL-C to close wvdial in the terminal.