Looking to see if the experts here can help me figure this one out. A little over a week ago I upgraded my machine from Windows XP Professional to Vista Ultimate. One of the tools that I used often, without fail, in XP Pro was Remote Assistance to help out friends and family with their minor computer issues. I had always used the Windows Live Messenger (8.1) method of having them request remote assistance from me, and it worked every time. Since the Vista Ultimate upgrade (clean install), I could never get Remote Assistance to work. It would make the connection and get up all the way to them entering a password for me, then the Remote Assistance window would come up...then nothing. Just a white screen instead of their desktop, then a time out error. After four different calls to Microsoft Technical support, I was able to get Remote Assistance working just fine (sort of...keep reading). It wasn't without quite a bit of effort though. More details can be found at the thread I start about it at another site...kind of details my trials and tribulations with this situation up to now. www.pro-networks.org/forum/about96338.html Anyway, after all the edits I had to make to the Vista Group Policy section as suggested by the Microsoft PRO support tech guy, Remote Assistance will work, BUT...only if I bypassed the DI-624. As soon as I hooked the router back up, problems resumed. No connection. I double checked and I do have Version 2.76 firmware installed in the router. I have tried the whole "Open Port 3389" thing, but that didn't do any good. I tried giving myself a static IP in the router, then opening myself up in the DMZ. Still nothing. I tried creating a dyndns account in case that would work, but it didn't. I spoke with D-Link technical support this afternoon and told them the same thing. They think that it could be that the DI-624 isn't completely compatible with Vista, and perhaps that could be causing the error. Does anyone here have any *specific* ideas on how this can be resolved? I will freely admit that I probably don't have a clue as to what I'm doing here, or what I need to do. If I need to open specific ports that I haven't tried already, where and how exactly? Would the whole dyndns service thing help me at all? And if so, once I have my URL, how exactly should I go about setting it up to make Remote Assistance work? Remember, this is about Remote Assistance, **not** Remote Desktop. Messenger 8.1 chat and simple file transfers work fine, but Remote Assistance does not. NOTE: I'd rather not go into moving over to the whole "VNC" software thing (Tight, Ultra, etc. etc.), as I want to keep this as simple and trouble free for the people I'm trying to help over a great distance. They're used to Remote Assistance, and I'd rather keep it that way. I would certainly appreciate any help and/or guidance that any of you here could provide. Thanks very much in advance for your time. --EDIT TO ADD-- D-Link DI-624 Rev. C router "emulator" setup: http://support.dlink.com/emulators/di624_revc/ Perhaps this could be useful in guiding me exactly where and how to open particular ports on this router. Thanks.