Many thanks for the comprehensive reply- much appreciated.

So I now have RealVNC installed on my Vista box- and here I think is the 1st problem- Vista. Reading around, it seems like most VNC progs don't like Vista much, so I'll have to work on that as a separate problem.

Anyways, I now have the N800 and the PC at least "seeing" each other, in that the N800 asks for a password when I try to VNC to the PC. But after I enter the password, all I get is "authentication to VNC server failed". If I try to add the IP address of the N800 as a viewer on RealVNC, it gives me a "connection failed" message.

I *think* I'm making progress, thanks for your help!

Update: I think I have now got my N800 to connect to the PC, at least no error messages are appearing, but all I'm seeing on the N800 is a white screen with a black dot which moves under control of the pen. Even though I have selected "disable local events when server in use" in RealVNC, I am still able to control the PC locally. Maybe I am now hitting the Vista issues with VNC? What do you think?