When I was setting up the new ISP in pppconfig I pasted from a document I had mounted from my MS Windows partition (vfat) and it must have included some of those weird control characters. I used fromdos (part of the dos2unix package) on: /etc/ppp/pap-secrets /etc/ppp/peers/sysim /etc/chatscripts/sysim And after that no more problems and I was able to connect using my new ISP Sysim :-) Zach