Sporatic dialing

Certainly none that I know of.  When I am absent and it dial up to the ISP, no program starts.  It just sits there tying up the phone line.

Have you tried to disable automatic dial-up ?
This won't prevent the dial-up dialog to pop up, but it will stop dialing out without your acknowledge...and save money ;-)

Could you post here the programs/tasks listed in your task manager ?
Maybe there's something running as "a service" (hence not seen in task bar) which invokes dial-up process...

Best  regards
-Stavi-

Maybe you can catch the dialing devil by using the taskmanager (Strg+Alt+Del) of Win98. Start it during an automatic dialing session and write down the active tasks. Restart your PC and start the taskmanager again. Compare the tasks you can see now with the ones before. The difference could be your problem. The name of the task should lead you to the troublemaker. Uninstall it and try working without it for a while.

Good luck
Horst

Theshoe,
Is this done when your mail program is running.  If that is the case, you may have the "check for new messages every xx" enabled.

Hope it helps.

Glenn

Hang in everyone.  This thing is so sporatic that I think sometimes it is not bothering anymore and then all of a sudden it shows up.  Just leave things as they are till I can do some more messing around with it.

You didn't answer my question...we should get more info to be able to help you.

BTW, if the proposed answer didn't help, reject it, so other experts are encouraged to open this Q.

Best regards
-Stavi-

To mitrakis,
I am sorry that I did not understand and follow the proper course of action.
As it turns out, the problem was the MSN Messenger icon.  When I got done with Messenger and cancelled it, it stay
in the start bar (rt side by the clock) as an icon.  My problem is solved if I shut it down completely each time I finsh using it.  Now I would like to close this thing out, but do not know how to do it.  Your help would be appreciated.  As far as I am concerned, everyone that tried to help me qualifies for the 50 points.

Thanks for the time.

Weninger changed the proposed answer to a comment

theshoe - I do this as a hobby and do not care a great deal about the points.  If you want to split them that's up to you, but I think you'd need to delete the questions and repost giving each of the respondents part.  This is not necessary on my part.

theshoe,

glad you solved the problem.
You can award points to anyone you wish by posting a question with subject e.g. "only for <name of expert>".
In case you cannot delete this question, just post a mesage in the customer area of EE and ask for deleting this question to get points refunded.
(refer to "Q.10298360" !)

Best regards
-Stavi-

johlari,  All the answers were good so am going to award points to first respondent for responding so fast.  MSN
messenger continues to be the culprit, should anyone else come up with this same question.  Thank you all for your patience.