Hi, Driving me nuts so any help to stop me going insane would be appreciated. I have a Dell laptop running Vista Home Premium and a PC running XP Pro. I can use a Remote Desktop Connection directly from the laptop to the PC through the local network. All good. I have tried to do this remotely and consistently get the message "This computer cannot connect to the remote computer". I have entered the external ip address as the "Computer" in the laptop RDC screen. I have created rules in my Netgear router to forward ports to the PC's lan ip address. I am at a loss. Any help would be greatly aprpeciated. Cheers Peter

The problem was solved just prior to me going nuts. The problem was the "Intrusion Prevention" signatures in NIS 2009. Was a simple matter of adding a new device to the network and providing trust control accordingly. Hopefully this will help someone. Cheers