[tlug] pppd weirdness

["Jonathan Q" <jq@example.com>]

Got a little ppp problem here (yes, how low the mighty have fallen; during my whole five years as a Linux user, I never had to use a modem with it b/c I always had either a leased line or fixed-ip
dial with an ISDN router in front of my home net; now here I sit with nothing  but a USR V-Everything Courier between me and connectivity oblivion) that  googling has not helped me with at all so far.

The system: RH 7.3, which uses wvdial and ppp-watch to approximate the dialup behavior familiar
to users of a certain other  OS.

About a week ago, I used the RH Internet connection config wizard to set up connections to the
two ISPs that we have access to here in Vietnam.  That part worked flawlessly, and I could connect to
both.  The only fly in the ointment was that if the lines were all busy, the connection didn't go through,
whatever (all not unusual here), it would just keep on redialing immediately, despite the fact that it was set for non-persistent connections.  I still haven't found a way to turn that off.  But I digress.

Since a couple days ago, it just stopped working.  I had changed nothing in the config at all.  The only thing possibly relevant is (because the deactivate button is useless to make it stop dialing) is that to make it quite dialing  because it was late and I wanted to go to bed, I had to just kill off the process(es), but no  file I could find had a time stamp from that day, so I'm stumped on that, too.

I can talk to the modem just fine using minicom, so it's not a modem or serial port problem.  A syslog tail indicates that pppd is being started on /dev/ttyS1 when I try to bring up a connection, but it never communicates with the modem.  No blinkenlights whatsoever.  Bypassing the  wvdial part and trying to bring up ppp0 directly gets the same situation.  It just sits there until I manually kill it, at which time it at least tells me pppd ended with error 35 (but like an MS error, I have yet to find what that means, either).

Deleting the connection profiles and redoing them also resulted in no change.   Anybody been there/done that, had a problem like this? 

TIA,

Jonathan