Remote Desktop Connection Quandry

I hate to start yet another thread over this networking nightmare, but I have reached the end of my rope. I've read all the threads on this in TH and the dozens of other places that try to help with this abomination.

My 2 PC's (PC-A and PC-B) are on a LAN connected via RJ45 a LinkSYS router connected to my cable modem. Both are running XP Pro. I have set up a local LAN and I can share files and printers across this home network. I can ping one from the other and I have tried to set up RDC so I can control one PC from the other and vise-versa.

Here is my quandry: From PC-B I can RDC to PC-A and gain control of it. Everything works fine. However, I cannot go from PC-A to access PC-B via RDC. Whenever I try I quickly get an error message "The connection was ended because of a network error. Please try connecting to the remote computer again. As I write this note on PC-A, I am listening to music stored on PC-B over the network.

- I have setup the system properties to enable the remote desktop on both PC's
- I have windows firewall running one each PC and both have RDC setup in the exceptions list.
- When I run "netstat -a" from PC-A I do not see it listening on port 3389, but when I do it from PC-B I do see it listening.
- I disabled the requirement to have a non-null password in the registry of both machines, but I still tried to RDC from an admin account that has a password. Still nothing from PC-A to PC-B.
- The Linksys router is set up to forward port 3389 to both PC-A and PC-B (whatever this means...)

And here's one more tidbit: From PC-A I can bring up a VPN and RDC to my PC at work. In this case RDC on PC-A works great. When I run netstat while this is hapenning, I do not see PC-A listening on 3389.

Any ideas??

i agree with this. i always had trouble with getting the RDP thingy to work sometimes so i just went back to VNC.