The other thing you may need is a good terminal emulation program installed on your home system. I wouldn't trust anything that comes with NT or XP to work correctly (Dwayne or Ravi might know better). What you want is a terminal that works exactly like the shell and can be modified to fit the minor variations between shells (sh, csh, bash,...). The native version of `telnet' I've used on XP at work is completely inadequate for this purpose.
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Yes, the native Win32 tools for telnet - both the command line executable, \system32\telnet.exe and Hyperterminal, which is best suited for serial connections to a device's management port (for ex. a router) - are lacking.
On the Windows platform, I use PuTTY -
<http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/>
which supports SSH and telnet and properly renders shell display modes.
If memory serves, Joanna's not a Windows user (Solaris on a Sun workstation, yes?) so this may be entirely moot.
.d.