managing a home network with Spiceworks

hi folks

i've got a small home computer network running thru an SMC Barricade router.
3 are XP machines, one is NT4, they all run either Zone Alarm or Kerio
firewalls in combo with the innate XP firewall.

I've downloaded "Spiceworks", mostly as a learning toy, to help me
understand how to do simple network troubleshooting. the bad news is, I've
never been able to sucessfully "see" the other computers thru my Explorer
network window. only the shared folders. and none at all on the NT4
system.

spiceworks asks me for my remote admin priveleges on all my computers. is
there any way I can create this type of privelege on the XP/NT machines, to
allow Spiceworks to log in to these machines?

thanks for any help!

Brad