After talking to a live rep at Earthlink support I can now report that the TA2005 software works - it had to have the needed connection settings entered manually in order to be able to find/connect with the network card and router. No problems with using Linux either - since it was a connection issue in Windows the subject did not come up and I saw no reason to raise it. Overall, I'd rate the responce to the problem quite good. Now maybe I can make some progress with Knoppix! I'll keep you posted.

Thanks,

Alice R.