If its Cisco, i gurantee its some type of ACL mismatch (well, mismatch in a sense that only one network can fully see the other. It's actually more secure this way, in a sense).

Your best bet is UltraVNC imo. It works on vista, and you can re-configure the port its accepted on (Dufe explained this above). It's free, relatively easy to install, and all you need is either the PC name or pc IP address. Of course, you will have to be able to see the remote computers on your network for this to occur. (IE, access list allows you to view them).

I should mention that at some point, when my boss was at a remote location working on a computer that had an existing connection to the server at our main office through a vpn, HE was able to remote into MY computer, but I couldn't do the reverse. I then tried to set up the same vpn configuration on my own desktop, which allowed me to locate the computer he was working on via a search (which I couldn't see before). But neither the computer name nor its current IP address would work when I tried to get on it. I wonder, do you think our router could be blocking that type of connection via a firewall? It's a relatively heavy duty cisco router.

Lastly, tonight I'm going to attempt to configure my home router to connect to my work computer. Because I wasn't able to configure any of the routers off-site, I can at least test it out at home to see if it's going to work or not and hopefully save myself some time.

Ag, I think that might be next week's task. Things were going great on my end; got everything set up the way it should be, only to discover that between the lady at my office who coordinated the installation of the routers at our other locations and the guy who installed them, 3 out of 4 of our remote locations have no info about the logins for the router. Their answer was "oh, gee, I thought we had taped the login info to the bottom of the router." So, at all but 1 location we can't access the router w/o resetting it, and nobody on my staff has time to do that right now. All because no one thought to write down some fucking user names and passwords.....swell.

Carno, that looks like a fantastic solution. Very doable given our current setup. Will tackle one location tomorrow or Friday and see what happens!!!!

Dufe, domain thing is a definite no go. I simply do not have time to make it happen and I'm the only one that could do it. This is what happens when you make your HR person do IT work....

Karli:

You will need to change settings on your company's firewall and/or Internet router.

Internet -> Your ISP -> Your Router -> [Company Desktops]

Your router should have an ip address which is public - it will be something OTHER than 192.168, 172.,  10.. An example would be 64.233.187.99.

This address is the address on your router, on the port which connects to your ISP. The other addresses will be on the Internal port of your router. For example, your desktop IP address maybe 192.168.0.65.

It will be the same scenario at each location. All of the desktops behind the router are on the same 'network' and will have similar IP addresses - as you've stated - assigned dynamically. This is why at your office you can connect to all the other desktops - they are on the same network as your computer. The remote computers are on a different network so you can't get to them. The desktop networks are likely 'private' networks and that's why you can't get from one to the other. If your desktops are not using public IP addresses then you have other problems (ie, let's talk about that if it's the case :) ).

The simplest solution is to setup a 'host' remote desktop workstation at each remote site. This could be an existing computer. This requires going into the router/firewall at each remote location and forwarding port 3389 on the router to the IP address of the 'host'. The 'host' needs to have a static private IP address. You will want to write down the public IP address for each public router. The best way to check out how to setup your internet router or firewall for this is to look in the manual under "port mapping", possibly in a section about NAT. Once configured, your router will basically forward all traffic to/from port 3389 on the 'host' desktop to whatever connects to port 3389 on the public IP address of the router. With this setup, you can open remote desktop on your workstation, enter the public IP address of a remote office router, and connect to that remote office's 'host' desktop. What you do from here is to then run remote desktop client on the 'host' computer and use *that* computer to connect to the rest of the computers in that office. Yes, you're basically piggy-backing off the 'host' computer. Also, any firewall software (windows, zonealarm, symantec, etc.) on the remote office computers will need to have an 'exception' added for port 3389. You should be able to google/helpfile this with the words firewall exception.

The remote office network must have different private IP addresses from your home office. If not, it won't work properly. If this is the situation, the easiest thing to do would be to change the IP address network in your home office (as opposed to ALL the remotes).

There are other ways to do this but they get complicated and/or expensive.

The last option is to install MSN messenger on every desktop and use the 'remote assistance' feature. I'm pretty sure that's what it's called... however, you rmileage may vary as to how reliable this works through your firewall. Another option is to use paid for service like gotomypc.com. Gotomypc.com is owned by Citrix so they likely have a good product. I haven't used it and don't know what it costs but it's still an option.

Here is how to open firewall exception if you just use Windows XP Firewall, as long as an overview of what you'll be doing:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q308127 

I would very strongly recommend you try to get a domain going for a number of reasons.  It would also make things like RDT a bit easier to manage for someone who is less experiences with networking in general.

Runhilan, I've been to the site you linked before and read through most of the other stuff; I don't quite follow the port stuff though. It kinda goes over my head. I don't understand the significance of it, how I would check to see my current configuration is, etc. I don't get the reference about sound, either. Can you explain a bit?

Each computer has its own accounts and security though I think. We use the standards windows login screen, not the one I've seen in bigger companies that have the more formal login screen. Anyone who is an administrator on their computer can add/remove users, change access, etc etc. So yeah, not super secure, I know...
Same thing at both my office and the remote locations, except the remote locations have no server hub.  They use the VPN to dial into the database that lives on XXXXserver here at the main office.

Do you guys run a domain server?  Or does every computer have it's own seperate computer accounts/security/etc?