Hi Cuddles

Oh well, it was a long shot anyway.

This is a "resolver" problem.
Your understanding of the situation
they just can't - lets see if I can use the right term - they can't resolve a "www.knoppix.net" querry into the needed IP address [?] - Is that it?
is pretty much exactly it.

The exercise I had you do earlier with the pings and the digs proved that it has nothing to do with the modem, nothing to do with permissions on the modem device, nothing to do with dial up settings and nothing to do with browser settings.

The problem either has something to do with the way that your dhcp is trying to reconfigure the resolver settings, or something to do with the resolver itself.

The idea of the resolver is that it tells any applications programs that are interested how to go about resolving domain names to IP addresses. This information is stored in the file called resolv.conf.
Of course, when you connect to the internet, your ISP gives your computer new instructions. These are sent down via dhcp commands, and the dhcp client then should modify resolv.conf to reflect the new instructions.
Something is funny (in a wierd, not ha ha way) with either your dhcp client or your resolver configuration. This seems to be specific to Knoppix 3.2, as things are different on 3.3.
This is why I asked about the existence of /sbin/pump, which is used in 3.3.

I fear that the "correct" solution for you is to upgrade to knoppix 3.3.
I realize that this is not an ideal solution in your case because
a. you can't readily download 600+ megs of iso image and
b. you have already invested much time setting up your current system.

Sorry, but I'm kind of out of ideas, and without a working copy of 3.2 to play with I don't think I can do much more to help with this one.