Hamachi:
On the Hamachi applet, when you click the lower left "power" button, you should see: "resolving", "connecting", "logging in", "probing" appear under the "5.x.y.z" hamachi IP.

For the peer to peer VPN to be established, the computers query Hamachi's server to get the IP's, and then the peers do the communication without needing the Hamachi server from that point on. If the process stops at "logging in" or sooner, then your Hamachi app is not able to talk with the Hamachi server. The "probing" part (I believe) is where app sends the peer to peer traffic to the computers in your Hamachi network to see if they're turned on and responding to peer traffic.

Check to see if the little green dot light up next to each computer's name on the Hamachi applet. If the green lights are lit, you can do a right click on one of the computers and select "ping" to see if the IP ping message gets there and back. If that works, you can do a right click and browse or transfer files to/from the remote computer. If the green dot does show up, but "ping" fails to connect. That indicates that there is a connection established between the two. If not, it's likely that your firewall is not letting the traffic through.

On the latest Hamachi version, under the "detailed configuration", I've found that setting the "Connection through NAT" for UDP port 12975 works well, going through four layers of firewalls here. In earlier Hamachi versions, this was called "magic" setting, I believe. This needs to be setup on all your Hamachi networked computers.

Also - both Norton Antivirus 2006 and ZoneLab antivirus/firewall need to be "trained" to let the Hamachi app send/receive messages through this port. This is a so-called "application firewall" setting. I imagine other antivirus or firewalls may need it also. For these two, they just pop up a little message the first time you try to "power on" Hamachi, and you just tell it that it's OK.

I've found that if you need to redo this each time you upgrade Hamachi - since it looks like a brand new program to your application firewall. ZoneAlarm had signaled that Hamachi was new, and I marked it to be allowed.

On my ZoneLab internet firewall, I manually set the IP address range 5.0.0.0 with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0 to "internet" zone (effectively 5.0.0.0 through 5.255.255.255). Then manually set each Hamachi IP address that's in your church network to "trusted" zone - eg: 5.23.250.96 . If you look at your firewall log, it will show you rejected or blocked packets, and that will tell you that you need to open up for that particular IP address. I did not need to touch the firewall settings on any of our routers (Dlink, Motorola, 3Comm), they passed the "magic" UDP port traffic without any problem.

To transfer files via Hamachi - in the Hamachi applet, right click on the computer that you wish to connect with and click "Browse". I've used the Hamachi file transfer without any problem. Make sure that the folders you're wanting to access on your remote computer are setup as shared. XP will not allow access from Hamachi to a non-shared folder, since it appears the same as a local network access. Any folder that you can access from the church's network ought to be accessible by the Hamachi browser.

Authentication problems - check to see if there might be some services disabled (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services)  that are involved with network authentication on your church computer. Security Accounts Manager (SAM) , RPC, Server, Workstation, and Secondary Login ought ought be set to "automatic", Netlogin and NTLM ought to be set to "manual".

Also, the computers should not have "simple file sharing" enabled - under "My Computer -> Folder Options -> View". Otherwise that forces network users to login as "guest", rather than authenticating with a username and password - to access networked folders using the Hamachi browse feature.

Ultra VNC:
Once the green lights are lit for all of your Hamachi clients, then the Ultra VNC server needs to be installed on the computer(s) that you want to access remotely. So for our case, the church laptop is the only one with VNC server installed (as a Windows service). The other computers just use the VNC viewer. You can install the server on each, but it's only needed on the computer(s) that you want to access remotely. I did not install the "mirror video driver" on the laptop (or any of our computers) - it's supposed to speed up the VNC transfers, but it seemed to me that it slowed down the MediaShout response time, since it appears as yet another video driver to the system. In your VNC viewer, you just enter in the Hamachi IP address of the church computer that has the VNC server installed, and then your good to go. Ultra VNC allows more than one client to access the remote computer - fortunately, there is a "chat " feature in both Hamachi, and UltraVNC where you can send a message to the other computer users trying to simultaneously access the remote computer.

Important Note - There are 2 ways to install the UltraVNC server - either as an application or as a service. If you install it as a service, then it stays active even when your screensaver times-out. I had the same thing happen - I originally installed it as an application and then it disconnects when the screensaver times out, so I changed it to installed as a service. When it's installed as a service, you'll see "VNC Server" in the services listed under Administrative Tools. Now when you access it after the screensaver times out, you'll see the same login prompt appear remotely just the same as when you're at the remote computer, and then just enter your login and password as if you were at the remote computer.

The UltraVNC file transfer applet can access any folder - since it looks like an access from the computer's console. I have found that the VNC file transfer is usually quicker than the Hamachi browser method (don't have to wait for the network browser window), so I pretty much only use the VNC transfer method. The only downside to the VNC transfer is that you can't sort files by date, by clicking on the column heading. The VNC file transfer window just sorts the files alphabetically, so I have to hunt around to find the new songs that I want to transfer. I read in the UltraVNC forum that the next release (1.0.3) will have enhancements to their file transfer applet to allow sorting by date, and some other features too. It's supposed to be coming out pretty soon....

Another tip - you can save your local VNC viewer settings, by doing a right-click at the very top of the VNC viewer window and then click "save connection info as..." . If you choose to save it with the password, then you don't have to enter the password each time. Then you can go to the c:\program files\ultravnc\viewers folder and drag the saved connection file as an shortcut icon to your desktop. Just double click on that icon and you're connected.

High CPU usage - I always run windows TaskManager (taskmgr.exe) to see if any applications or processes are slowing down the system. I've noticed that there sometimes is an interaction between the VNC server program running on the host computer (if a VNC client is connected) and Mediashout's keyboard polling routine that can cause Mediashout to run very high CPU utilization. Fortunately, there is an easy  workaround - In Mediashout, just click on "Audie", and then "Lyra" and that will cause the CPU utilization to drop back to normal. That sequence is all that is needed to break whatever race condition existed between Mediashout's polling routine and the VNC server's polling routine. We have a Mediashout startup script written in AutoIt3 that automatically does this for us when MediaShout is started up.

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