What service could be causing my USRobotics ext Courier modem to dial up on it's own? There seems to be no pattern to it. There are no apps running. I am networked from my w2k machine to another 98 machine in my home. I have checked to be sure Outlook Express or any other programs are not asking for service. Any ideas?

Under your Net Connection Sharing tabe, turn off dial when needed. That should fix your problem

I could only find "dial on demand" so guess that's it. I'll give it a shot but will have to wait and see as it only does it ever-so-often. Thanks for the info...

Nope..I tried it but turning that off will not let the Win98 machine dial out on Internet Sharing through the W2K machine. It almost has to be one of the services on the W2K machine since nothing shows up on the "tasks running" screen on either machine when it happens. It always receives 287 bytes and then sits there till the modem times out (5 minutes)If a mail program or browser was doing it, something should show up from the ISP, either mail or web page.

This is irritating, I know. My PC will try to dial out for no apparent either (and I have a DUN connection shared with Win98).

The Win98 machine isn't trying to access any net services as far as I can tell. I have disabled Dial on Demand, and will see how it goes.

What you can also try is to install ZoneAlarm.

It is free (for personal use) firewall software, that will not allow applications to access the net unless you specially tell them they can.

By installing it, you will get prompted everytime a program tries to connect. It will remember applications, so you don't have to keep telling it to let IE out on the net

One major problem I found with it (and I'll admit I didn't spend much time trying to fix it), is that your online games won't be allowed to connect to servers. And because they run full screen, you probably won't see the 'Let application X access the internet?' message. You can probably get around it by ALT-Tabbing or something, but I didn't have time to look into it.

Give it a go and see what you think. It will make more or less invulnerable against port scanning and other hacking attempts. Very important if you DSL or some other always-on connection.

I found and loaded ZoneAlert. Very nice program. Right away my modem dialed up and ZA caught it. It was from a server trying to send me stuff. I went to the ZA website and the explanation was that sometimes your ISP doesn't disconnect properly and tries to reconnect you. (Sometimes up to two hours later) Since my ISP assigns IP's I will have to find out it if the IP I caught is truly one of theirs.

Dial up networking will attempt to reconnect any disconnected network drives in '98 and since my client machine is on '98, I believe this was the problem.
The fix: on the '98 machine click Start, Settings, Control Panel and double click Properties. Click Client for Microsoft Networks, Properties. Click to select Quick Logon box, click OK and click Close. It might ask for the Win '98 disk. If so insert it. Done....

That annoying feature of zone alarm with games that run full screen can be fixed like this. An example for me was Quake1, when trying to connect to an internet server it just froze cause I couldnt see the prompt from zone alarm to allow access. After getting out of quake I loaded the ZA control panel click programs tab and saw Quake 1 but with no boxes checked cause I couldnt answer the prompt, but u can check the boxes allow access to internet and allow to run as a server. Then it will work next time.