Found out what the problem was. Windows turns the power off or something to the modem and when the PC crashed it got all confused and wouldn't turn the power back on. When windows tried to update it "discovered" the problem and corrected it so that it could update itself.
Wonderful. Just wonderful. The system tells me the the modem is ok, but it really wasn't. Gotta love Windows. And no, I am not going to move to Linux or whatever. I'll stick with windows.
