Well, I have partial success with my modem with the Topic chip set that I've been fighting with. I ran the DOS configuration utility and hammered in the values for com3 and then ran Loadlin. Presto! Strange, huh? Now, if I could either make those settings stick or convince Linux to actually use setserial properly, I'd be fine. At least I have a temporary work-around which I will be adding to my linux.bat script.