VPN over Linksys Issue

[AngelicKnight]

Ok, been working on this one all frickin' day, and I'm firmly stuck.

Got a user at home with a Linksys wrt54g wireless router. Uses PPTP VPN to connect to us remotely. Usually, with most wireless setups, our users don't have any issue connecting unless, say, they're at a hotel where port 1723 is blocked on the firewall. Not the case here -- home user with brand spankin' new Linksys router.

Might I add the user is pretty clueless too, doesn't know the first thing about configuring a router, so for the most part it's running on factory default settings.

So disregard even working with wireless just yet -- connected to the router via ethernet cable, has Internet connection just fine, tries to connect to VPN, and gets error 619, which is usually indicative of port 1723 being blocked -- but just with linksys factory default settings? Surely not. I've never heard of Linksys devices blocking VPN connections right out of the box.

Now that router is in turn connected to a Speedstream modem, ISP is SBC. According to this article, that means I'm in for some real fun. However, I'm staying in denial as long as I can before even trying that -- It was everything I could do to walk the user through locating the C: drive, much less resetting his modem and reinstalling his router. Surely there must be a simpler solution?

I did try a firmware update from version 8.0 to 8.0.2, the latest release, and it worked great for maybe an hour or two. But then he tried to set up encryption on the wireless, and we're back to 619 errors, wired or wireless.

Doesn't make a lotta sense huh?

So I'm about to call up Linksys and see if they can offer any actual advice on this issue.

In the meantime...any ideas?

FYI googling has turned up that a ton of people have had the same problem with no solution...let's see if AO can deliver the answer.