The uninstall failed but after a restart (and a few German error messages), a second attempt was more successful. It also made me reconsider whether my frequent disconnects with the Cisco client really were down to my ISP as it seemed far more reliable than the Cisco client had been on Windows Vista/Server 2008/7… and there’s not much more to say… it worked for a month, it nagged me to activate it as the trial period came to a close, then I uninstalled it.

This installed without a hitch, was able to use the PCF file provided by my administrators and had me connected to the corporate network pretty quickly.

In the meantime I decided to use the NCP client for a 30 day trial period. PCF file I had for the VPN connection contained an encrypted password, which I needed to track down, and the current version of the Shrew Soft client can not import these files. That was no fault of the software – it was just that the. I installed the Shrew Soft client first and then found that I couldn’t connect to my VPN server. Please bear in mind that I’m an end user of the Cisco VPN infrastructure and not a network administrator – those who know more than me about this stuff may have their reasons not to consider one of these two clients. This isn’t really a review as such, but it is a short summary of what I found.

Shrew Soft VPN Client for Windows (v2.1.5-beta-5).

NCP Secure Entry Client for Windows (v9.12 Build 34 – beta).

It’s also a 32-bit only solution and, thanks to comments left on this blog, I’ve been trying out a couple of alternatives on my 64-bit Windows 7 release candidate (build 7100) machine, namely: Installing Cisco’s VPN client on Windows 7 requires a bit of hacking and I found it increasingly unreliable on my connection to my company’s corporate network.

Shrew soft vpn client alternative