schtasks.exe on remote machine

What we've got is a windows XP SP2 machine in our office who's entire purpose is to run a powerpoint show which gets sent to the cable company for the local government access channel. Our cable company contractor decided she wanted a laptop so that she can make updates (school closures, announcements, etc.) from home across a vpn. So we got her a vista business laptop to do this with. So far what we've come up with is to use pptview.exe on the XP machine to run the powerpoint show as a scheduled tasks, then the laptop accesses a shared folder with the presentation, modifies it, and stops and restarts that scheduled task remotely. This works perfect when both computers are xp machines, but vista is giving us a headache.

The webpage we've been using in addition to the /? switch on the computer is:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736357(VS.85).aspx

We've tried different variations of the command, too many to list here, and they all either result in a syntax error or an access denied message. Are we trying to do something that just is not possible in Vista or is there something any of you know of to make it work. But the kicker is that most of the variations of the command we tried from one XP to another XP did work, so there is something different with the vista and there is a convenient lack of documentation for it on the internet.

Our next option will be to go out and buy pcanywhere or something like that, but we would kind of like to stay away from that for cost and security reasons. And the thought of rolling this laptop back to XP did cross our minds, but we are going to have to move up to vista at some point so we might as well start now.

We've got firewalls on both computers turned off, so that isn't blocking things either. What could it be that is not letting this work in vista, but allowing it in xp?

Did you disable Windows Defender too? What about using Remote Desktop? GoToMyPC and LogMeIn are some other choices.

UltraVNC is free, check it out.

According to that website Vista and XP both support the command so not sure what the issue is, I have never used it myself.

When she VPN's in, what is she connecting to, a server? The XP box?

We've got the defender turned off, as well as the regular fire wall. I think part of our problem us none of us have any formal training in vista so it is only making things that much more difficult.

When she does the vpn in, her xp machine both runs the slide show and has a shared folder with the presentations in it. But I am thinking we are doing something that just plain will not work in vista, which really doesn't surprise me one bit. This is only the second vista machine we've gotten, and neither of us are as blown away with it as jolly ol' microsoft promised us we would be.

I think I am going to give that ultravnc a try and see what happens, thanks for that!

Just an update--I set up ultravnc on both machines and it works wonderfully. I showed the big boss, and he thinks it looks good but still wants to figure out the solution for the way we were trying to do it before. So we can go into a production environment with ultravnc and it will do exactly as we want it to. Thanks for the help!!