Long time listener - first time caller! At our college computer lab, I have a need to disable Remote Assistance in XP Pro (mainly due to online test-taking and the possibility of academic dishonesty). How can I do that? I know about changing the group policies but that won't work in this case. We have some students who must have administrator rights to do programming homework. I guess what I'm looking for is the registry key I can manipulate so Remote Assistance is not even an option. Thanks for your help! Tim

According to my 2003 guidebook, you can stop Remote Assistance by limiting it in Group Policy or by blocking the port it uses to get in/out - block TCP port 3389 on your firewall.

We are running 2000 SP1 for our domain controller - not 2003. All of this is running behind the firewall on the College's intranet.

No difference - whether it is 2003 or 2000 - just block that port on the College's firewall.

Thank, cleo -- we'll try it.

I worked at a private computer college back in the Windows NT days and we had 5 locked down machines set up for exam taking purposes and once they were locked down with the mandatory profiles, they had one option on the start menu - Internet Explorer - and it had only one website it could go to - our testing site. Right clicking was disabled, the browser ran in kiosk mode which means there were no buttons or options to click on. I had my best student hackers try to make it go to a different website and they could not break the security. I have not tried to lock down an XP box in this way but if it was possible in NT it should be possible with XP.

We don't have that option here. Our students are testing in the classrooms and remoting either to the lab or off-campus for assistance. Or any combination of that scenario. What other common applications will/may be disabled if we block TCP port 3389?