A while back I blogged about the difficulty associated with installing a certificate from an HTTPS site to add it as a trusted provider. Yesterday after installing Vista RTM I remembered the other pain point I was having. In previous versions of windows when you go to login you can elect to connect via a dialup connection (prior to logging in). This is useful if the network you are on is not your LAN and you need to VPN into a domain in order to authenticate. Unfortunately this option seems to have disappeared in Vista (maybe it’s there and I just can’t find it).
There is a work around as Vista now supports switching domain users (previously you could only switch users if the computer wasn’t connected to a domain). So, you log in using a local computer account, connect to the VPN, switch user and log in as with the domain account. Luckily you only need to do this the first time for each domain user as the local computer will cache the login credentials (effectively allowing you to login while disconnected). Once you have logged in with the domain account you can of course connect the vpn to get access to domain information etc.