Remote Assistance Errors from Vista Ultimate to XP Pro SP2

[binarydaddy]

Good Morning,

I am trying to help a customer at a satillite office in DC. She sent an
invite from her XP Pro laptop via the file option to me and I attempted to
connect to her via my Vista Ultimate laptop.

She is behind a VPN/Firewall with DHCP enabled and ports 135 and 3389
allowed for passthrough. Her windows firewall has Remote Assistance, Ports
135/3389 and Rem. Desktop set as exceptions and her Remote Tab under System
Properites has allow Remote Assistance to be sent from as well as allow this
computer to be controlled remotely.

I everytime I attempt to connect, I get and error, "The connection failed
because the user may have logged out of remote assitance."

I have never heard of an error like this before. I am also behine a
firewall...but all of our other techs can access other machines off the
network with remote assistance fine. However, I am the only one using vista.

ANy thoughts as to what the problem may be or other settings I may have
overlooked? Oh and they connect to their home network via a VPN and have no
server onsite that would need configuring...and the VPN is disconnected
before I attempt to connect.
--
Thanks,

Binarydaddy
IT Consultant
Northwest Ohio

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Open the Remote Assistance file with a text editor and check the IP. It may
be the customer's DHCP-assigned one rather than the external one. If so, you
may need to edit it to her external one (have her use something like
http://whatismyip.com/ if she is unfamiliar with logging into her router to
obtain it).

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[AlexB]

I suggest you should try Remote desktop. It is more transparent and
parameters are easier to control.

After that it may be easier to troubleshoot assistance.

 

[binarydaddy]

Alex,

I tried Rick's option above with no success. My only beef with remote
desktop is...wouldn't I need to setup a specific IP to forward the REmote
request to? If so, that would be hard because other than changing the port
on the PC, there are two machines that would need to be setup for that.
Because it is a remote site, I dont have access to the router remotely unless
I am logged in to one of the machines.

I will attempt it anyway and if you have any other insight to this, please
feel free to to post it.
--
Thanks,

Binarydaddy
IT Consultant
Northwest Ohio

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Make sure she has her router set to forward requests on 3389 to the internal
IP of the target machine or it will never receive your attempt to connect.
Similarly, you will encounter the same problem with Remote Desktop.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com