GTW et al,
Yes, I was refering to USB connected modems. I started with an Acer laptop that was known to have the power issue with the BT supplied "Frog" so I put a powered USB hub in but still had the problem of the line dropping if not being kept active. A colleague of mine with an IBM ThinkPad had the same problem, whilst another colleague with the same ThinkPad worked fine.
I tested this by putting up a desktop PC (also an Acer) with the Frog and it worked fine. I also put up a firewall on it and was surprised by the number of probes coming back up the line, hence my comments in the prvious post.
Eventually I put in a Draytek USB router and it was solid as rock until I upgraded the speed of my line to find that the BT supplied modem was the only one not supported by the Draytek - hence the move to a Netgear router which plugged in and went straight away.
As for the 99% - that was my estimate. Current experience of USB modems is five tried - two didn't work but I figured that 40% failure may be subject to a small population tested :-) The aim of "99%" was to say that nearly everyone has a good experience, and I figure that the two failures I know of were due to USB silicon support being earlier cuts combined with older Win98 support being a little less robust than XP is now