Hey, no problem Andy. You're in new territory here so it's all gonna be unfamiliar to you for a while.

You can open up all your programs from the command line as long as you know it's command. Let's see if you have kppp installed. open a terminal, any will do, and type:
kppp
And press enter.
Anything there?
If not, it should be a simple matter to install it. Just open your redhat package manager and look for kppp. I believe it's in the kde section. Just for fun, let's see if you have wvdial installed. Also from the command line, become root. You do that by typing:
su
And preseeing enter. It will ask for your root password. Enter that and press enter. Notice that the '$' sign is now a '#' sign. This means you are now
Super
User. Type:
wvdial
And press enter. Is it there?