ColdFusion over a home network?

Can you successfully ping each machine from the other? Can you share a folder and open it on the other machine? If you can, it then appears to be a firewall or network issue. If not it looks like a network issue. Does running ipconfig give you the IP you expect?

After dealing with PWS for all those years, I was happy to abandon it and use the internal webserver instead; one less thing to install after each rebuild is a good thing in my book. But maybe I will have to try IIS if I can't figure this out. Thanks Ian for the idea.

Still open to specific suggestions as to what browser or network settings I should double-check from any knowledgable parties would be appreciated! I may still have the same problem even with IIS...

"Tried static already, and no go. Which network/client settings would
you suggest, and where do I find them? And have I got the URL format
correct:

http://[ip address here]:8500"

That should be correct, but it does assume a correctly running network.
Unfortunately I can think of several possible culprits. Firewalls on
one or both machines, something in the network portal connecting the
machines, browser settings, hosts file entries.

Hopefully somebody more knowledgeable in getting computers to talk to
each other can chime in.

I just realized that my static test may not have been the test I thought
it was. Since you are using the CF built in web server it would have to
serve the static pages as well. I've never really used the built-in web
server. Free versions of IIS, Apache and others are easy to get and
install I have always used one of these so that the web server is
separate from the application server.

Win XP has a developer version of IIS but it is not installed by
default. One needs the installation media to install it after the fact.
Just go into the Control Panel -> Add|Remove Programs -> Add|Remove
Windows Components and add it. It is limited to one running virtual
host at a time. But otherwise it is a useful web server for development.

You'll have to reconfigure CF to use the IIS web server if you go this
route.

Tried static already, and no go. Which network/client settings would you suggest, and where do I find them? And have I got the URL format correct:

http://[ip address here]:8500

I swear I did it this way a few years ago, and it would work until I loaded a page on the primary machine's browser, after which I'd get the message that the dev version only supports calls from one ip address.

First thing I would do is try a simple static HTML page. If you can
access this page, but not a coldfusion page then you need to look at the
application server. If you can not even access a straight HTML page
then you need to look at the network and|or client settings.