Now that I am back from a wedding, I can resume my modem debugging. As I said previously, I've tracked down the source of the mysteriously changing /dev/ttyS3 permissions to ppp itself. When I use kppp or wvdial, the permissions are crw-rw---- until ppp starts, at which point the permissions change to crw-r-----. /etc/ppp/options reads as follows: --- asyncmap 0 crtscts lock hide-password modem noipdefault proxyarp lcp-echo-interval 30 lcp-echo-failure 4 noipx --- For the record, I'm running Debian Sid, although if this and the KDE font madness continues, I'm going to start looking at Gentoo. :Peter