NETGEAR® WGR614v6 crashes with Windows XP Remote Assistance

The Remote Assistance feature in Windows XP and Vista is pretty nifty: it makes the job of the family IT man (i.e., yours truly) much easier when supporting those family members who are not expert users. There have been reports about how difficult it is to get Remote Assistance to work with NAT routers/firewalls. However, if one initiates a Remote Assistance request through Windows Live Messenger (Actions, Request remote assistance) can work through routers without too much hassle ... if your router does not crash in the process, that is.

I have a NETGEAR® WGR614v6 with the latest firmware (V2.0.19_1.0.19NA) and I noticed that when I accept a request for Remote Assistance, the router crashes. I know it is the router because if I connect my computer directly to the cable modem, Remote Assistance works smoothly, and because I can get the network back in order by resetting the router. So I dug around the Internet in search of a solution to this problem. Much to my dismay, NETGEAR’s user-support forum does not seem to have anything to say about it. But through perseverance I found an article on this blog Infovore, which, although it does not deal with crashing with Remote Assistance per se, pointed me to a setting that I had not considered tweaking: SPI firewall. So I checked the box for Disable SPI Firewall in the WAN Setup page. In addition, making NAT Filtering open also seemed to be something I thought would help, and so I did. And lo and behold! Remote Assistance now works without a glitch.

Thanks to the author of the Infovore blog article and the commenters for this tip, and I hope my article here will be of use to those who are experiencing with similar problems.