Case of the Disappearing DSL

For the past two weeks I've been having an extremely weird problem with my DSL. Every once in a while my DSL connection will simply drop. Most of the time this takes place within a matter of hours, but there was a brief period where my connection was fine for nearly three days. The lights continue to flash on my modem, and the NIC shows up just fine in device manager, but no connection is possible. Also, a program supplied with the modem (a Cisco 675) called Commander, which is usually used to set various modem settings, is unable to detect the modem and simply times out when looking for it.

About a month and a half ago we started having some weird problem with our phone in which between the hours of midnight and 8 AM (give or take), there would be a constant loud buzzing which both us and the party on the other end of the conversation could hear, so loud to the point where conversations were impossible. A week or so later, we had Qwest come determine what was wrong, and they blamed it on a faulty wire. It was replaced and the phone was fine and there was nothing wrong with the DSL. Then a few weeks later, completely out of the blue, this started occurring.

I know it can't be an operating system problem, because I've formatted twice since it began, both times solving nothing.

The only way I've found that I can get my connection back is to do the following:
1. Remove my NIC from device manager.
2. Say yes when it asks to reboot, and as it does, unplug my modem's power supply.
3. Upon reboot, it detects the NIC, reinstalls it, then asks to reboot again and I say yes.
4. While it's rebooting, I plug my modem's power back in. The machine boots up perfectly, and my connection is completely back.

Any help with this problem will be much appreciated, as I have no clue what to do.
- It's not a Windows problem (I've tried both 2k and ME)
- It doesn't appear to be a hardware conflict because it worked perfectly before and I haven't installed anything new since (and if it was a conflict, my DSL wouldn't work at all, would it?)
- It can't be a defect in the modem, can it? Like I said, it DOES still work

Thanks.

Are you able to ping the 675 when this happens? It definitely sounds like a bad DSL modem.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>