Vista - Cannot connect to vista remote desktop from XP -- How do I allow access to the port?

Hello,

I am on a corporate domain running windows vista. There is apparently a group policy that is preventing me from starting the windows firewall service. That's fine since I don't want to use it anyways. Before joining the machine to the domain, I enabled Remote Desktop. Now, even though remote desktop is enabled, I cannot connect to the vista machine from my XP machine. I tried to telnet from the xp machine to the vista machine on port 3389 and it failed. So my suspicion is that I need to open up this port on the vista machine somehow. What I don't understand is what's blocking the port? The firewall is disabled (service is not running) and I haven't installed any other firewall software. Also, both machines are on the same subnet and remote desktop connections are possible on other machines over the LAN, so I don't believe it's anything that needs to be changed on a router.

Anybody have any suggestions? This is starting to drive me insane! (I'm a software developer, not a system or network administrator, so this is really a weak spot in my knowledge.)

DO you have network discovery and file sharing and or private network enabled in the network and sharing center? Just a small suggestion

Thanks for the suggestions. File sharing was turned on. Network discovery was set to a "custom" setting, I've since set it to "on." Same results. I've also discovered that the vista machine is not even pingable. Something is blocking ports on that machine and I cannot figure out what.

I've solved this -- sort of.

I was reading through this technet forum: Base Filtering Engine Service Broken - TechNet Forums. It led me to try disabling the Base Filtering Engine service and its dependencies, which worked. Now I only wonder what downstream repercussions this will have...? I'm sure some network administrator will be at my desk screaming any minute now

Yeah, lol, you can look in services to see the dependencies on this service. Just double click on Base filtering. control panel-administrative tools-services. Also maybe take a look at Local security policy and advanced windows firewall settings. It's always good to take a look around!