I have scoured other posts to see if this is anywhere else, but I apologise if it is...

Me and a friend are connecting for netplay super-melee,
He can connect to me fine, but not vice versa, I am unable to connect to him.
Anyway, we both press battle! and I can choose my ship, but none of his keys move to select which ship he wants, no keys at all work except pause and quit ( F1 and F10 )

Am I being a dunce and missing something real important here? is there a fix for this? is it possibly a network issue ?

EDIT: more info

We have both portforwarded our routers to the correct port.
He is on a windows 7 machine, I am on XP.