I'm tired of driving an hour to my Mom's house when she needs me to do something on her computer. I want to set up remote access. WinVNC is the only program I'm familiar with as we use it around the office. Is it safe to open up a port on her firewall and leave VNC server running with password protection?

A better option might be to setup an ssh server and you can tunnel anything securely over it:

Some info from a commercial product:
http://www.bitvise.com/remote-desktop.html

I believe cygwin has an sshd as well (free)
Edit: http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html

I just use Windows XP's own Remote Desktop. And a client for Mac OS and/or Windows 2000. Hell, I'm in San Francisco right now and controlling downloads of some missed TV on my home machine. Last week while in Vegas I even downloaded episodes of Lost and Alias to the hotel room so my GF and I could watch them at a cabin in the Grand Canyon.

Bruno

VNC will be safe enough, though mostly due to obscurity. Much better is to run SSH (as already suggested), and then use it's "port redirection" capability to run VNC inside it (without VNC even being aware that it's happening.. Cool!).

Cheers

I'll go with SSH and TightVNC. Those instructions are great, thanks!

Perhaps you could, for good measure, restrict IPs from which her router accepts connections.

VNC's authentication processes perfectly safe. no plain text password exchange. the connection itself is not encrypted.

If you're worried about someone sniffing your session, there are some vnc addons for stream encryption.

http://www.realvnc.com offers and enterprise edition with 128bit AES
http://www.laplink.com/products/vnc/overview.asp has built-in ssl encryption

for admining a home PC, you've got nothing to worry about with regular VNC. I'm normaly a paranoid when it comes to network traffic, and I don't worry about VNC.