My grandfather lives in an apartment building, where he gets a 192.*.*.* address.
I have no access to the network components to configure RDC or anything through the firewall.

I'm looking for a good (free?) remote desktop tool that would let me tunnel through port 80 or an SSL connection to remote his machine and help him out.

I know this can be Googled, but I always defer to experience rather than anonymous info.

Windows?

Sounds like you want hamachi (www.hamachi.cc), a client-initiated, mediated p2p vpn program (contacts a 3rd party server for port negotiation upon connect, then it's p2p once it's running), and then you can use windows remote assistace/desktop on port 3389

other than that, there's TightVNC which is a good alternative to remote desktop

Ahh..yes..I couldn't remember the name, Hamachi.

Isnt Tight VNC, (which I'm also familiar with), restricted by netowrk, if its blocked via firewall?

huh?

i'm thinking of using VNC through hamachi, where you connect to the 5.*.*.* ip address. idk what you mean by 'restricted', but ive been able to use VNC over the plain old internet to remote servers publically allowing connections (yes, insecure, but it wasn't my problem to fix)

probably not what your looking for but you could potentially use net meeting or windows meeting space, you would have to get him to start the connection but once connected he could share out his desktop.

You had the right idea though dk as straight VNC would need TCP ports 5800-5900 forwarded by the router, so indeed, that approach alone would not have worked. It should be okay over Hamanchi though.

However, for simplicity sake though, just using LogMeIn Free should also work.