You can use the winsock control to make a server type app that listens on a particular port, accepting a connection from a remote app & swapping packets of data back & forth. The vb help & sample code was good enough for me to make a simple tic-tac-toe prog over tcp/ip, altho that was some time ago & I cant recall the exact details.

You can also call one of the networking or dial-up dll's from vb to initiate a dial-up connection if you need to. If you are going to make a dial-up connection one would assume that it will be using PPP, and the easiest solution would be to set up a web server on the central host & use ASP and forms. You mentioned that this was ruled out as an option, but you may want to suggest to the powers-that-be that this would provide a tool set & existing capabilities that you will have to otherwise reproduce yourself.

Anyways, if you end up using the winsock control to write your own tcp/ip comms routines, I could try to dig up some sample code or at least offer advice if you have probs with it.

Les.