I was hoping someone could point me toward a tutorial/program that
doesn't rely on msn messenger to do remote assistance. Also, I'm looking
for a way to set up the remote support without worrying about NAT. I
have been trying to find an open source something or another for this
but haven't come up with anything just yet.

In business I used to use pcAnywhere to remote control servers and pcs
around the globe. However it needs to be installed on both ends of the
connection and is not open source.

It did give me the advantage of allowing me to take control of the
remote desktiop as well as be able to do a ctrl alt del or reboot
remotely though and have it reconnect as soon as the unit came back
online.

As far as a tutorial or an open source version of it I would look
towards either some of the cds you hae on ebay for disatser recovery
disks or the people in the black hat hacker world.

Personally, I want no affiliations with them I am strictly a white hat
kind of programmer but they are out there and they are typically well
versed in Linux as well as Windows and Mac.