Remote Assistance - Not always able to connect

I ran into a situation where I could not connect to my fathers PC using Remote Assistance. Now, given that he lives about 3000 miles away it is essential that I am able to connect with Remote Assistance to help him with miscellanious activities. I discovered that the Remote Assistance files are really nothing more than XML, and upon edting the XML I realized there was a series of invalid IPs in the UPLOADDATA block's RPTICKET attribute. Upon removing the invalid IPs I was able to immediately connect. I am not sure where they all came from (some were the obvious local IPs behind his firewall).