Well, the Time Warner repairman has been & gone.  He was very friendly and quite knowledgeable. 

The modem, of course, tried to make a liar out of me.  At 4:05pm today, it was STILL not showing the lights for online or computer.  But as soon as he walked in half an hour later, it had all its lights going.  Grrrr.  But no matter, he had a magic box that he hooked it up to, then he contacted the modem directly, and its values didn’t agree between the two.  And when he examined the history, it showed it had been offline a LOT lately.  He went out & got the new modem.  And he also got a new splitter which should help my ‘net connection even better (and yet still enable me to watch telly on my PC if I should desire to do so).

Anyhoo, things seem to be working okie dokie now.  And it feels good to have my body whole again. 😉  (I now know how Sweeney Todd felt when he picked up his barber knives again.)