Well, I ended up "fixing" my grandma's cable modem. Turns out the account was never finished signing up, and they apparently just route you to only a few specific places inside their network until you finish it. It would have been nice if they told us that though. It's done now, and none of their extra software running, and it seemed to be nice and speedy when I was there. Seems people like the idea of leaving email up all the time though with the alert sound for new messages - so much more convenient than actively checking. :)