Global High Score Component issues

After my rant last night, I thought I should bring it back down to what I am doing and not what other people are not doing. See what I did there ?

Anyway, I got the Highscore component into the game real fast. then once it compiled I called it to set it up etc. all went well, and fast! That was last night.

Tonight I am a little baffled. I thought I had to sign up for two Creator accounts to do some network testing. After many issues I found that I was not handling a local profile that had no online permissions. Ok, should be easy enough. so I set about creating another persona for me to test with. Now just so's ya know. I have two PC next to each other, as well as the Xbox. I figured I could just test between the Two PCs. Well NOOOOOOooo you cannot. Unless you have a live account. So i got one. Then i paid the money and made it golden and shiny. Still no love. It appeared I was now required to make the new Gold account a CC or creators premium account.

While I was studying this though I found a couple of posts in the XNA forums (great place for information or to help others out ya know!) These posts said I could use a Local profile on the PC. Woohoo! Cha-ching I am gonna save some money! Yeaaahhhaw!

Then about 40 minutes of playing with code and otions etc later, i am baffled. I cannot get the Xbox and PC to see each other through the systemlink. The Xbox thread seems to give up on looking for people to join shortly after it starts. Now this is not my code, so is still a little hard to work with. But it has been used in a number of games already. Why does it not work for me. And while we are at it, I do not understand how these machines can ever get to see each otehr anyway. The code requires a Host and a finder. Then when matched you can share your scores. However From what I have seen of the code and the print statements, neirther machine ever goes into Host mode. Hmmm, That could be an issue, but could be one of many.

At this point I might just cough up the money to have my two PCs connect to each other. But I don't know. I would rather buy another piece of music for the game tbh.

If anyone has any suggestions or Helpful advice. I would love to hear some. I have of course posted in the forums where otehr people have said that they are having success with this.

So it is with heavy sadness that I now go to Bed.

Sleep well y'all, I am sure I won't with my mind swimming with network connectivity possibilities.

g'night