Coupla points, mostly in a "what you said" stylee.

Firstly, PuTTY is excellent at hanging onto a connection, as long as you turn on the keepalives. It has a habit of letting connections time out if you don't.

Secondly, yes, SSH does run on VMS, but unless Droo's people have got a software subscription, those MicroVAXen are likely to be running something reasonably ancient (i.e. VMS 6.x or even earlier), and SSH is only supported on VMS 7.3 onward.

It works teh roxxor.