Migration assistant won't migrate

Trying to migrate from my son's Macbook Pro to his new Macbook Air. Both are running 10.6.8 and have had all the latest software updates run. Tried wired (with ethernet adapter for the MBA) and wireless - he doesn't have a Time Machine backup to try.
In each case we get through the point of entering the code from one computer to the other and things chug along, but the screen never comes up asking which items I want to migrate. The Macbook Pro displays a dialog saying that communication was lost from the other computer. I'm given the option to hit cancel which will abort the process (though it never does) or hit OK to continue to try (which never results in success. Meanwhile the MBA just says "processing."
This whole process has been very frustrating. I've read any applicable posting I could find here, but haven't found anything that solves the problem.
Here are some questions I had:
- do specific sharing preferences have to be set on both machines?
- I believe the ethernet port on his MBP works OK. I turned off Airport and was able to connect through ethernet to the Internet. Is there any other way to tell if the ethernet port isn't communicating?
- I tried doing the initial transfer while the two computers were with me for the weekend. Now he's back at school 4 hours away. Is there a way I can screen share with one or both computers to continue to troubleshoot them remotely? If so, pointing me to the source to do that would be helpful as I've not tried it before.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
Patrick

I found that I needed to create another temporary admin account and run the migration assistant from that account. Then the option to replace the original admin account was no longer greyed out.
I suppose one could enable root and log in as root as well to do this.

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