Boot up in fail safe. Then remove it. Chances are that if it's a laptop. It's a winmodem. If you can find out what chipset and version number is on the modem (Not the name, that varies a great deal and tells you nothing). Then emulators, drivers and some patches are availible for download to be able to use certain winmodems with Linux. I recomend if you use a modem though. Get you an external hardware modem. It works like a charm. I have a cable conection. But I also have a 56k Zoom external hw modem as a backup. It comes in handy if the cable goes down. I can use it to dial in with Linux or Win32 platforms without to much hassell.

Hope this helps you.....