Right after I return from vacation, my ISP decides to make its cable modem customers use a DSL-style Microsoft VPN dialer.

Of course this doesn't work at all .... I can ping the VPN server OK, but everything that goes into the VPN (including DNS packets) are getting lost. Tech support claims that Norton firewall is to blame even though it is disabled.

Update: English translation of the above is that I was offline today because of software problems. Now things are finally fixed.