Hi Duane,

In terms of the WinRM comment, it wouldn't surprise me if it tries it to see if it's available, especially if WMI fails for some reason. You might also want to check in case you have other mid servers that do have the parameter configured and it's using one of those unexpectedly.

I gather with DCOM you figured out what was going on there - essentially that after the initial connection it gets assigned a random port to communicate on, but generally as long as your firewall allows the return connection that should 'just work', will depend on your firewall config though for sure.

In terms of the ports/protocls that are used, this page might help:

Discovery ports and protocols

That has a pretty good summary of all the ports etc.

Hope that helps,

Stephen