Tina,
Yes, there have been recent changes to Hotmail.
Hotmail has been busy upgrading accounts to the latest version of Hotmail.
If you can login at work but not from home I'd recommend all of the local computer troubleshooting steps such as clearing your web browser cache, deleting your cookies, trying a different web browser, and/or reinstalling your preferred web browser. If clearing your cache does not work I realize that downloading Firefox will take a long time but it's worth the effort to download it tonight when you go to sleep and try reinstalling Firefox in the morning.
Have you tried using Internet Explorer to login?
Is it possible that the dialup is just taking a long time to download the Hotmail web pages? You should still be able to use Hotmail over dialup. I was on dialup for the holiday weekend and did not have any problems. It is slow, and sometimes takes several minutes to load a page, but it works.
-Raymond