Thanks all of you who gave me advice on the simple problem I was having. Yes it was obvious but you helped me see the wood for trees ;) Slimboyfatboyslim tcp only, ck yes it was a firewall issue, Martim Peach and Pall Thayer off course it was the ip address of the other machine. Frank Barknecht thanks for reminding me about the telnet app in windows. Roman Haefeli yes its over LAN and finding PD now is stable in XP than when I tried it over a year ago in Win98.
Its like discovering midi again but with a phatt connection :)

Mark