Remote shutdown from xppro to vista home basic

Hello,
although I googled a lot I was unable to find a solution to this issue.
It just appears many others have this issue...

I have a network with 2 pc's and one has windows professional sp3 and the
laptop has Win Vista Home Basic.
They share some folders properly and without any trouble. I often use them
in a gateway to gateway vpn ipsec connection between two routers in two
different houses but I have been unable to use the remote shutdown command
between the remote systems.

The remote shutdown between vista and xp works flawlessly but I can't get
the xp to vista remote shutdown configuration working.

No way...firewall disabled, remote registry access service enabled and
running but I always receive the "unable to find network path" error. Both
respond to ping in either ways and shared folders are accessible!
I am turning out crazy about it!
I tried via command line and via GUI interface: network path not found!

Has anyone got it running and working or is it impossible on a Vista Home
Basic edition?
I also tried to access the laptop via compmgmt.msc console to no effort. If
I try to connect to the other pc it says " win 32 access denied"...

Therefore I am starting to wonder if it can be a restriction of winvista
home basic edition.

Can anyone help?

TIA,
Stefano