Hi Charles,

This goes beyond my area of expertise. However, we at MS now have smart cards and smart card readers at home to dial-in (so to speak) to the corporate network. I'll see if I can get one of our network techies to explain and respond accordingly.


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>PMFJI - how do you get past the firewall at work? My big confusion about remote access stuff over HTTP ... would all be very simple if the boxes were sitting there with their fixed IP addresses exposed to all the world, but I don't imagine that is the case at MS and it certainly isn't the case here at my home office where everyting is behind the Linksys router. Do you find XP Remote Desktop handles this smoothly? How do you set it up on the receiver end - assuming the receiver is behind a router/firewall. Links? Tips?
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>TIA
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>>Remote Desktop is "bomb" (as my teenager would say). It's only in Pro. It allows you to remote in or out of your PC; it's Terminal Services technology and massively useful. I use it daily to check my email on my office desktop before leaving for work.
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>>>>You asked me in a followup why XP Pro over home? Here's the page which describes the differences:
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>>>>http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/whichxp.asp
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>>>Looks like to me that the only really significant issue for a home system is if you want to do web development on the machine ( No IIS ). If the IIS issue could be resolved, I see no great advantage in using XP Pro at home.