Remote assistance, same old story

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.work_remotely (More info?)

I've posted this before, gotten some good suggestions, none worked.

I'm running two machines behind the same router, the XP Home machine can ask
for remote assistance, the XP Pro machine cannot. I think that dismisses
the router as the cause of the problem.

The Pro machine is not running a software firewall, isn't running a virus
checker (has never had a virus).

When "Invite a friend to connect to your computer" is clicked upon, a
message immediately pops up that says "A program could not start. Please
try again".

Now if one searches for that string, one finds it in a file called
constants.js. In fact that string appears twice, once in a variable called
L_NOCHANNEL_Text, the other in a variable called L_NORCSESSION_Text.

For the fun of it I edited the strings differently, added the letters noch
to one of the strings, and norc to the other. The error message changed,
now it says "A program could not start.nochPlease try again".

Clearly for some reason I'm failing to create or find or open a channel of
some sort. Beyond that, I'm still stumped.

Anyway, that's problem 1.

I can ignore the error message, since I get a screen where I can click on
"Invite someone to help you". After about a minute, I can go through the
process of inviting. I click on "save invitation as a file, do the password
and amount of time before it expires setting, and then click on save
invitation. At that point I get a message that says "Remote Assistance
failed, Please try again." That string is also in constants.js, but I
haven't been able to change it through editing, so it's being sourced
somewhere else, I guess.

Any thoughts?