I was not speaking of a firewall on the PC you are using when trying to connect to the remote db. My firewall exceptions needed to be set on the Windows Server 2003 PC that I connect to that houses my SQL 2000 and SQL Server 2005 database servers. You would need to have the hosting server folks verify they have the firewall exceptions added that are needed, unless they have their firewall disabled, which I wouldn't think would be a great idea.