Since I started this thread, I've just been using a Windows 2000 RAS/VPN server. I do have a Windows 2003 server on the network but that's meant to be isolated for our software programmers - I don't really want to install RRAS and make it a "production" server. The main drawback in our setup at the moment is that my PDC is still NT4 so I've got no Active Directory and can't make easy use of the better capabilities of 2000/2003 VPNs yet

To make my day even worse, the main person in the company that I need to make this effective for is my Sales Director. She's got a flashy little Sony Vaio laptop which doesn't have a modem and uses a PCMCIA 3G / GPRS card (basically a 384k digital link that works like a mobile phone). And, for some bizarre reason, I haven't been able to get the bloody thing to dial out ALL AFTERNOON !! AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!

My deadline is 7am Monday morning so it looks like I won't be out having much fun this weekend!

During this weekend, I have also installed my Win2000 RAS/VPN server as a secondary DNS server on my NT domain in case that helped. I have also installed NetBEUI onto my PDC, the RAS/VPN server and my home desktop PC (VPN client) as I read somewhere that WINS needed it. None of this has helped.

So, in conclusion, I've had a most un-enjoyable weekend, having worked most of it. But I've now decided to draw a line under it and I'm back home now to enjoy what's left of the evening before an early start back in the office tomorrow on other (more productive) projects. Despite it all working very slowly, the Sales Director's laptop with the 3G/GPRS PC card now dials up and the VPN now answers. It can use Outlook and, because it's normally on the domain in the office, it can browse the network drives.

If anyone has any other suggestions for this, I'd still be interested to hear them and add them to the list, although the chance of me finding a spare fortnight to waste more time on it is somewhere between slim and non-existant! I'm going to a full Active Directory network at Christmas (yes, that's how busy I am!) and the VPN will then be on a Windows 2003 server, finally