HSP modem no longer works after upgrading, installing Beryl..other bad things

**MOBO: ASRock p4vm800 with Unichrome pro graphics card, HSP56 Smartlink Modem (AMR), 256mb ram.

My HSP Smartlink modem was working Great in Mepis. Then I saw that Beryl was available so I decided to give it a go. I plugged the 6.5 repo into Synaptic, downloaded and installed xorg 7.1 and the 6.5 upgrades.

Then I ran Beryl.. it showed a gray screen, and hung. I rebooted, and then I got a CMOS checksum error.. owie. I rebooted again and went into BIOS...all of my BIOS settings had been reset by, I'm assuming, Beryl.

Ok, so far so bad... NOW Mepis will not see my Modem, at all, using any setting (devmodem, ttso, etc) I uninstalled and re-installed the slmodem daemon, no dice.
I totally uninstalled Beryl.. No joy. I tried it as root, no love at all.

Any clues as to why Beryl would reset my CMOS and also make me lose the ability to use my Modem? I checked, the modem still works fine (in windows)..so it's not a hardware issue.

Thanks in Advance