(please don't full-quote your replies.)

internaughtfull wrote:

I probably will pass on the ethernet card, but would the
bootlog.txt method help me diagnose this problem?

Speaking frankly, the use of the USB port to connect to a broad-band
modem is highly inferior to using an ethernet port. Ethernet cards do a
much better job of handling network data transfer than USB, and require
less CPU involvement (more of the data transfer is done by the hardware
with ethernet, vs much more cpu involvement with USB).

Most computers made in the last 5 or 6 years will have an ethernet port
built into their motherboard. If yours does not, then you obviously
have an old motherboard, meaning you have a relatively low-speed CPU
(Pentium 2 or 3, probably less than 600 mhz in speed) - which would
benefit even more by having an ethernet card and using it to communicate
with your broadband modem. Ethernet cards are very cheap - $10 to $15.

That would be booting up with the usb plugged in, and then
trying to access the bootlog somehow before it got
overwritten by a safe mode boot log.
Is that worth looking at?

The way I see it, I would never waste my time trying to fix USB
connectivity to my broadband modem - because I'd be using my ethernet
port for that. And one more thing - I'd have by modem connected to my
router, because I have more than one PC connected to the internet and my
modem has only one port, so my router (8-port) allows for more devices
to be connected to the internet - and none of those ports are USB.

Currently, if I boot up a few times in safe mode, shut down,
then boot up into regular win98, it will not hang if no USB
is plugged in.

It's not uncommon for a system to hang if certain USB devices are
plugged into the computer during power-up. And this problem can come
and go without changing anything. One more reason not to use USB to
connect to your modem.

Then if I turn off the firewall, plug in the modem, then
turn the firewall back on,

If you had a router, you wouldn't need to run a software firewall.
Routers use a protocal known as NAT, which (as a side effect) functions
as a firewall.

Your modem *might* be implimenting NAT internally. What are the first
two numbers of your IP address (as seen when you open a dos window and
enter the command ipconfig) ?