Well I did find that the IE setting you described was set to "Always dial my default connection". I changed it to "Never dial a connection", and that didn't help. So I closed everything down, and rebooted, figuring that maybe this was read once on startup. Still didn't help. So I deleted all my mail accounts AND my dial-up setting altogether, so as far as this computer is concerned, there is no dialup connections possible. The I re-defined the account on the cable ISP (Comcast). Now, when I fire up Thunderbird, I get a popup that reads, "An error occurred with the POP3 server. Mail server mail.comcast.net responded:" (with nothing following the colon; the implication is that it responded with nothing). So now I can't get any mail (until, apparently I restore the dialup access). So even though there is no dialup access defined, and the only mail servers defined are those on the cable ISP, T-bird insists on still trying to dial to get mail. <sigh>

A great idea, Andrew, but unfortunately nothte right one here. I'm thinking that Another Scott might be right after all, but I have no idea where to start looking in the bowels of Windows for that microscopic datum. (We need a really good proctoscope for that!)

Any other ideas?