I use TightVNC to connect to many computers all over town that do not respond to ICMP PINGs.

You do, however need to allow incomming connections on port 5900 ( default) or whatever port you have VNC listening on. I would not under any circ umstances run VNC over the internet, however. If you need to remotely access a computer via VNC then tunnel it through an SSH connection. To do that, you'd ne ed to install an ssh server (like OpenSSH for Windows) on the VNC server, config ure VNC to "accept loopback connections" and also tick the "allow only loopback connections" box. On the client side, you'd need an ssh client like PuTTy. In PuTTy, youd set up a tunnel from local port 5900 to 127.0.0.1:5900 for the remot e end. To connect, you'd simply SSH in to the VNC box then fire up your VNC cli ent and connect to 127.0.0.1:5900 (or 127.0.0.1::5900 (2 colons)if using TightVN C), enter your password and you're in....securely. Also under that configuratio n, the only port that needs to be open to the world on the VNC server machine is port 22 for SSH. That's how I connect to my clients around town. If you need help/download links fo rthe above mentioned programs, etc, just let us know. Yo u don't need to be able to ping a host to connect to it. VNC's help website ass umes that the computer you are connecting to is following what used to be accept ed practice of all computers replying to ICMP ECHO requests (ping). Years ago, you could be relatively certain if a computer didn't respond to a ping then it w asn't on line. This is not the case today, since if you don't reply to pings, f ewer automatic scanning utilities will scan your computer because they think it is not up and running, therefore you're slightly safer from being scanned and po tentially exploited.