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Ever had a houseguest from hell? A former college roommate, maybe, or a deadbeat cousin who stops by for a day or two and a couple of weeks later is still camped out in your guest room polishing off the potato chips and using your phone to chat with friends in Indonesia? Imagine finally ousting those characters, and then coming home a month later to find them back on the couch, channel surfing and complaining that you're out of cheese puffs.

That's how some folks are feeling about their Internet service providers. I've gotten several dozen letters recently from hapless ISP subscribers who continue to be billed for accounts they thought they'd canceled. Russel Suzuki and his son Todd, of West Point, Utah, tried four times to cancel an account with Virtualhosts Internet Services, in Portland, Oregon, to no avail: For six months, the charges kept showing up on Todd's credit card statements, despite the company's repeated assurances that the account had been closed. Even after Todd canceled the credit card, he received a bill from Virtualhosts in the mail. "It appears," says Russel Suzuki, "that the account is unclosable." In an e-mail, Virtualhosts said that the Suzukis never sent a "proper" cancellation notice via phone, fax, letter, or e-mail, but the Suzukis dispute that claim. Virtualhosts added: "We are a new ISP and [sometimes] make mistakes."

A similar story comes from AT&T@Home customer Betty Kinser: When her PC was stolen, she immediately called to cancel her Internet service. She even faxed a copy of the police report to facilitate a refund for the unused charges. Four months and countless phone calls and faxes later, the account was finally closed; to date, however, Kinser has received only a partial refund. At press time, AT&T was working with Kinser to resolve the issue.