[bossa nova]

Admiral, I use it on my Mac and my Windows 2000 machine at work from home. We have VPN access so that allows me to penetrate the firewall at work. It works really well.

What kind of pc do you have or more importantly what operating systems are you using? Also which version numbers of VNC are you using. You may want to try some different version numbers. I have found several that were buggy.

You shouldn't need to change any of the settings - it should work right out of the er...box.

For my viewer I have been using "Chicken of the VNC" version 1.3.5 (I also noted when I went to look up the version number they have an email address for support)

For my VNC server I am using OSXVNC v. 1.11. I also have it set to use display number 0. I recall once when trying to get set up that the problem was the display was set to 1 and changing it got me going again.

I spent a couple of days fooling around with the different rfb pixel formats and it did improve speed and response but I went back to default settings eventually.

Try setting up a server on some other machines to see if you can get it working there. If you like let me know and I can send you the versions I have been using which seem to work well.

Some things you could check...Make sure you have the same port number on the server and the viewer. I am using port 5900. Try to hook up the machines with a cross-over cable...it's possible the switches or routers you are passing through might be filtering out some types of traffic. (They are filtering appletalk where I work) Also check the firewall on OS X (if that is the OS you are using) to make sure that its not on. If you are behind a firewall you probably don't need it anyway.

Also Jux is right MS does have a widget called remote desktop but I am told it only works with MS's server products. In addition I am hesitant to use anything MS anymore as their pricing seems to get more and more cost prohibitive. Also VNC has an advantage putting it way way above things like pc anywhere and timbuktu. It's the cross platform deal. I can use VNC on any platform be it UNIX, Windows, APPLE OS'es (you know the earlier ones?) etc. They also have a Java client. And you can control in either direction.

I also feel it's important to encourage open source development. It can only help the Mac users as well as the linux bunch. This is really all new to me with OS X but getting a better understanding of the whole shabang by digging deeper into the guts of OS X makes me understand how much better the world will be if we support any open source projects.

Let me know if I can help at all.