In my previous post I mentioned the beta of Windows Live OneCare (v1.5) that I am running on my Vista RC2 laptop. What I didn’t mention is that one of the annoying bugs that I have found is that it prevents VPN connections from working. Perhaps I missed something but even after going in and explicitly allowing “Microsoft Virtual Private Networks” whereever I could find a reference, I still couldn’t get a VPN connection to work. I actually thought it was a bug in Vista until I tried disabling the firewall in OneCare and the VPN connected perfectly.
Updated: There are actually two workarounds for this. The first is to disable the firewall in OneCare and enable the Windows Firewall that ships with Vista. This is just as secure, although it does leave the OneCare icon red, which bugs me. The other workaround is to add port 1723/outgoing to the exceptions list. This is in addition to the “Microsoft Virtual Private Network” exception (in the default list) mentioned previously.