Two public betas of VCOM were released in September 1996, and several months went by with no further progress. It was rumored that Ojas was in need of the Win95 DDK kit, so he could create a proper .VxD driver. Bugs in VCOMs design allowed it to only support one com port, and it could not allow a BBS to disconnect the online user, making its use very limited. By March 1997, Ojas has lost interest, and vanished soon afterwards.

In April 1997, A friend of Ojas's brother named Dedrick Allen decided to continue NetFossil on his own. Dedrick created both a FOSSIL driver and a Virtual AT modem interpreter, (but not a Virtual windows com port) for Win 3.1 and Win95 called NetModem/16 , which was confusing since PC Micro had developed Modem Server/Client solution also named NetModem in 1996, which was bundled with Microsoft Backoffice Server and Small Business Server (SBS).

Dedrick's Netmodem/16 software only supported one node, and suffered instability, which Dedrick blamed on buggy third party libraries which he used to create it.

By the end of 1997, Dedrick released a 32bit version of his Netmodem for Windows 95. It did not support NT, and was considerably less stable then the 16-bit version. It included an impressive GUI interface and installer, and showed a lot of promise. Many sysops registered the multi-node beta version, in hopes the stability issues would be resolved.

Dedrick release Netmodem/32 10.beta4 in February 1998, which still encountering intermittent crashing of Windows, resulting in either a reboot or a blue screens of death. To make matters worse, Dedrick vanished, and for the next 18 months there were no further updates.

In June of 1999, Dedrick reappeared with a public alpha version of his Netmodem version 2.0 This version only supported a single node, and was said to be a total rewrite without the aid of third party libraries. By then many of the Netmodem users had moved on to other solutions. There was a rumor that Dedrick was later involved in a serious car accident, and after being released from the hospital he never regained intrest in his projects. Dedrick later reported that he actually had used a third party library to create version 2.0 alpha, called Delphi Shortcut bar. Dedrick had purchased the source code to this library, but he later lost that source and the company that had licensed it to him had vanished, so Dedrick was unable to compile future updates.

David Yon had a better track record. Version 1.0 had proven to be stable, In 1999 David developed version 2.0 of his virtual modem under another name, which included its own FOSSIL support. This worked well for BBS use, but was limited to only allowing many door programs (which were designed to work on COM1 through COM4 only) to only run on up to 4 BBS nodes. In 2003 a new licensing structure was used based on the number of virtual COM ports required, which made it far too expensive for the budget of most hobbyist BBS'es. PC Micro's BBS was a beta site for David's virtual modem software in 1999, and in January 2000 PC Micro became a VAR for the software, and eventually took over as the primary reseller/support site.