I fired the tpad A21m up this morning, and, for no particular reason beyond a hunch, I used Goback to revert the hard drive back to the state it was in at startup on 12/31 when the nic/modem disappeared.  I used Goback during the boot, and when Win 98.2 loaded, the Goback screen popped up showing the files that had been replaced.  Among those were all the files related to the nic/modem.  I immediately tried to get e-mail and everything was working again.  I am on the Internet writing this message from the laptop.  Apparently, whatever happened to make the nic/modem disappear occurred during the 12/31 boot.  I don't know what it was, and although I'd certainly like to if anyone knows, thanks to Goback I am back up and running again as if it never happened.

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