Unable to use laptop offline

With the help of ths forum I have networked my laptop & desktop together, the laptop had a built in card, & I installed one in the desktop, then installed a crossover cable between them. Here is the problem when I turn on the laptop, it automatically has my desktop dial my ISP, I am unable to use my laptop offline, even when I click cancel during dial up on the desktop, it will wait & try to dial up again I have disabled auto-dial in the control panel on both computers. My OS is XP in both computers

Sounds like some app on the laptop REALLY wants to phone home.

Unless you know which app, it could well be a piece of spyware/malware/adware. Run Ad-aware, Spybot, and a good AV scan. Then remove all temp internet files.

I installed & ran SpyBot, cleaned out the temp int files, was able to use the laptop offline, however when I restarted it again dialed up. Using msconfig I unchecked bmupdate, I now seem to be up & running, by the way I have no idea how bmupdate got ther in the first place, as I do not use a scanner on the laptop ? ? Thanks for the help