Vista - VPN problem?

Hi guys.. I have two computers. One with Windows XP Pro and the other with Vista ultimate. Both are behind a modem/router. I want to connect them through the internet, so that i can have a file share between them, like i am on lan. I have configured the Vista pc to be a server and the XP as a client. I do the following on vista. I create a new incoming connection, allow the users i want, and enable the "allow callers to access my local network" option in tcp/ip properties of the connection. I also port forward the TCP 1723 port on both pc's as well as GRE. So everything should be fine. When i connect from my xp pc with a vpn connection to the other, the connection establishes and on the vista pc, i can see it says one client connected and it pops up the new network wizard and shows the user i used to connect. However on the status of the vpn connection says, ipv4 connectivity, not connected. My problem is, that although the connection is established , the pc's can't see each other in network. What am i doing wrong? I have read a hundred of articles that say that all you have to do is this. Any help appreciated, thank you.

PS: I also tried the other way around, with XP as server and vista as the client, but with the same result.

anybody?

Try disable the firewalls on both machines while you're working on fixing this and then ping the "private" IP of the other box from a CMD prompt to test the connectivity.

If ping is successful, try Start | Run | \\<Vista-private-IP> from the XP box and vice versa. If it doesn't work, what's the error message(s)?

I'm not clear on what test you're referring to when you say they can't "see" each other, so if you can expand on that that would be useful.

Thanks for answering. Firewalls were already disabled on both pcs. And ping doesn't see each other. That's what I meant with "don't see". You can't view the other computer in the network, or in net view command. Also if i enable the option to assign automatically ip addresses to the vpn connected clients the host get's a completely different ip from the client. But if choose my own ips it gets them normally, but still with not a difference.

I also tried Hamachi to see if it works, but the same thing happens, the pc's connect to the same network, but when i try to right click and browse each other's files, nothing happens. Anybody suspects what's wrong?

What's the error message when ping-by-private-IP fails? Until that works (assuming firewalls are disabled), everything else will fail too because you simply don't have network level connectivity.

It might be a routing issue too. Are you using DHCP to assign IPs for the VPN, or specifying a static range? What (extra) IPs are being bound to the client and server once the VPN connects?

I finally managed to get Hamachi to work normally. As for Windows Vpn connection, i can ping each computer private vpn-ip, but i can't get them to create a network. For example, i set the vpn-server pc to accept incoming connections and give them ip's from 10.1.0.1 to 10.1.0.2 since i only want to connect two pcs. If i enable the option to auto give ip with dhcp i can't even ping. From the vpn client i also tried to set the dns server of the vpn connection as 10.1.0.1 (which is the vpn server). But nothing happened.

My VPN-server pc's router has the ip 192.168.1.1 and the pc is 192.168.2.2 If i leave everything at auto in incoming connection setting, my vpn server gets the ip 169.254.0.28 and the vpn client gets 192.168.1.2 (which is already assigned to my other pc localy) and as dns 192.168.1.1

I have simalar issues.
Ended up using hamachi but i really dont want to use 3rd party.
I might try do the set manual IP and see if this works as i managed to get them to ping just not browse the network.

Yes me too. After i set my own ips, i am able to ping, but not always. But even if i ping i can't browse the other pc from network too.