PPP applet wont disconnect

[dd55 cornell edu]

I am having trouble with the PPP dial up applet in Bongo. It connects 
fine, but when I try to disconnect, it doesnt recognize it is already 
connected, and it tries to reconnect, and says it has failed to 
initialize the modem. I have also noticed that after using this applet, 
gnome becomes unresponsive, and I have to ctrl/alt/backsp to exit gnome,  
and restarting X fails to load gnome, it appears to hangup just before 
the picture loads. I could really use some help.
Darren