I thought that I was the only one with these problems. What you describe has been happening to me as well.
ADSL is great but if the modem is disconnected and you try to reconnect its a hell of a job to get it to get a connection. Like you I went for a powered hub, but please be aware that I tried to put other devices on the hub and started to have all sorts of problems, so now I have the modem on its own powered hub. One problem away.
With Zone alarm I seem to get a lot of pings, probes etc and have also found that some of them come from my own PC, have a look and see what your PC is called and see if you are getting alerts for it.
Im interested in this discussion so if anyone can shed light on these problems (sorry opportunities) then I would love to know the answers.
The ISP is BT and connecting via BT Openworld ADSL. The modem is Alcatel USB, with the most up to date drivers
[ 10 September 2001: Message edited by: SLF 999 ]