Broken XP dial-up connection manager?

[XavierHyde]

You know how XP usually brings up a requester as soon as you or a program attempt to do something that needs a DNS entry to be resolved or otherwise need to have you connected to the Internet in some way?

The dialog I'm talking about usually has a line saying something like "You (or a program) have requested information from <address here>." and then present a list of your configured dialup connections.

It doesn't appear for me anymore and if I use anything that needs to have access to the net that program will fail.

The only program which brings up a dialup requester is IE, and it only brings up the simple small dialog with three buttons, not the advanced one where you can select a custom phone number and all that.

Firefox and Thunderbird bring up the correct (advanced, with four buttons and phone number dropdown) requester, but these are the only programs that do so.

Any help or hints? Searched TechNet with no useful results returned. I don't desperately need this fixed, I just want to understand WHY this problem has appeared and how to prevent it the next time I re-install Windows or how to restore the functionality in my present system.

Note that this is not an isolated problem. I've seen this happen on some (even freshly installed) XP and 2000 machines at work which are on dialup as well. So I'm assuming it's either a known bug or a deliberate "hotfix" from Microsoft that has caused this.

[TaRaKa]

go to the internet propertys and on the connections tab make sure u haven't got the never dial a dial up conection option selected

[XavierHyde]

  TaRaKa said:

go to the internet propertys and on the connections tab make sure u haven't got the never dial a dial up conection option selected

Of course. "Always dial my default connection" is selected, as it should be. Yet only IE seems to recognize this fact. All other apps (PuTTY, Pine, and the rest) seem to assume I'm always connected and thus fails DNS resolution and chokes if I'm not already connected. All local network hardware (NIC, 1394 adapter) is disabled.

I've noticed that I seem to have acquired my ISP's DNS suffix without having been notified or chosen to do so, which could be the culprit.

Still since this happens also at work, I'm tending to think that's not the problem.

More suggestions, please. :)