Hey I feel for ya! I've been having the same problem.  Funny tho, I
installed the same thing on my laptop and it works fine! I knew I had to
switch to a hardware modem and bought an Aceex DM56V14, works great on
w98, but I'm having the 'pppd daemon died unexpectedly' error
occaisionally crop up. I then loaded the latest ppp rpm from a Mandrake
mirror (WA) and that error finally went away, but Netscape just won't
hook up.

BTW, I used Mandrake 7.1 from the Linux magazine I bought a while back.
Now I've got a problem with my 17GB HDD so things may come to a halt for
a while until some $$ become available again.