TK I used to use VPN to work remotely. This probably doesn't help much, but I found more often than not, I found the issue was on the work PC end not accepting the connection-- someone helpful came along and saw I hadn't powered down, and would do so for me
.
I am running AVG, and never had an issue connecting while AVG was running.
What we had a number of people learn was VPN was not supported on some versions of XP. This is too techy for me, but people on 32 bit were OK, people running 64 bit could not connect VPN.
I got a company laptop last year, and do not miss VPN