First of a -- great read!! I've been through many, many (too many!!) XNA books trying to decide what to use for the latter part of a "Intro to 3d Game Programming" class, and your text (finally) made my decision easy.

In our setting, however, the XBOX's will be behind all of our proxies and firewalls. Do you happen to know what ports need to be opened up for the Xbox to communicate with Creator's Club?

For me, using Windows Vista, during the connection phase between Visual Studio and the Xbox, there was an option to automatically add the necessary exceptions to the firewall...guess that depends on what firewall you are using though.

Here is a walk through of the process (XNA 2.0):

LINK

Wait, on second thought....re-read your post, you are behind a router possibly and worried about that?

Re-read again, lol. Ignore all my posts, lmao. Sorry about that!!

I've found that XNA Creators Club just needs the same ports open as Xbox Live. You can find out more details here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908874

If your Xbox and your PC are different sides of a firewall (which would be a strange thing to do, but might happen in a lab I guess) then I'm not sure which ports need to be open between them. Perhaps the best way to find out would be to use a packet sniffer like Ethereal to inspect the traffic between two systems on the same piece of wire.