>Hopefully someone can give me help with this - even though it has nothing to do with VFP.
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>Does anyone know of a small utility that I can run in the background that will show me when I am dropped from the internet? I am using a Cable modem (nothing real fancy, just one computer connected to a hub which connects to the Cable modem), and in the last two days I have been disconnected several times for just a couple seconds.
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>The only other thing connected to the hub is a Vonage Cisco box (VOIP), and this goes down also during these outages.
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>The Cable company said from their records they can't see where I was ever dropped from the web, but I am positive I was - as the Vonage would disconnect and also I wasn't able to log into web sites.

Well, you could create a VFP app with a timer. When the timer fires, RUN the PING command (of some site that responds to PING, like yahoo.com). Redirect the output of PING to a text file. Parse that text file for the phrase "request timed out".

Does the connection simply disappear for a few seconds, then come back? If so, in order to catch an outage the timer interval will have to be short. The default PING command takes several seconds to run. If the connection stays off that would be easier to detect.

I think there are also threads here you can search which use the WinAPI to "check for Internet connectivity" or words to that effect.