What happened is that when he suggested power-cycling it, I said "that shouldn't be necessary" and he agreed. This was a DSL modem that took 90 seconds to boot, did the PPPoE itself, had a basic firewall capability and a 4-port hub built-in. It didn't fix the problem, anyway. Power-cycling computing hardware "just to see if it fixes it" is a Windows mentality.
Curiously, when I flashed my 802.11b Access Point, the readme file said to power-cycle it, but by the time I read that, it had finished flashing and was running the new firmware!
Wade.