Strange Dialer Issues

I was connecting to my ISP the other night, and when I was finished with my session, I went to my ISP's icon to disconnect. When the right-click menu option appeared, it only showed the "connect" button, rather than disconnect. I pulled up the properties, and it said that I was disconnected. I also happened to notice that my connection icon had disappeared from my taskbar. However, I was still able to navigate to web pages.

I checked my phone line, just in case I was only surfing pages that were in cache, but there was modem noise on the line. Anybody have any ideas what could have caused this anomoly? I have Windows XP (and thoroughly hate any Microsoft OS's) and I know Windows Update was running at the same time I was connected earlier.