I recently bought a US Robotics 56k v.92 external modem. I hooked it to my COM1 port and it works fine in Win2k. In Slackware 8 however I can't seem to get it to work. My internal modem still works ...

the microsoft driver for the agere softmodem is very flaky. If this is an OEM box, and I would assume that it is (HP or Compaq?), use the driver from the OEMs website, it's actually newer anyway.