VPNs and Vista

Published on Sunday 15th June, 2008 (AEST)

One of the common Vista gripes I've heard among other systems engineers is that the Connect to a network interface can be very slow to open up. It seems that the more VPN & dial-up connections you have listed, the longer it takes for the screen to open. When you have one or two dozen VPN connections configured on the your system, the delay can be painful.

Then, once the Connect to a network screen opens up, you're faced with a list of your connections in alphabetical order, but collated in a case-sensitive fashion. A connection named AAA is listed before a connection called BBB, but connection aaa will be listed after BBB. It actually makes the ordering more of a nuisance than a help.

One way I've found to get around this is to avoid the Connect to a network utility in favour of Remote Access Phonebook (rasphone.exe), found in %SYSTEMROOT%\system32. This application opens quickly, and lists your RAS connections in an alphetical order that ignores case.

On a side note, to backup or export your VPN and dial-up connection settings, you can copy the RAS Phonebook file, rasphone.pbk. The phonebook file for shared connections can be found in %PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk, while the file for private connections is in your user profile.

This topic is discussed further in:

"Connect to a network" delay on Vista (28th Oct, 2008)

A hotfix is now available to fix the delay.

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