Y'know I might talk to the helpdesk about that, out of curiosity.
I can see a case for it to catch all non-local traffic (i.e. basically override the default gateway) which would leave the local LAN working. But I can see why it'd need to scotch incoming traffic that wants to return out the "normal" gateway (i.e. the real ISP link). Hmm.
(And I remembered exactly how I circumvented that with my remote desktop trick: I'd SSHed from the Win7 box to the Linux box, then I started the VPN, then I initiated an SSH tunnel between the Linux box here and the Linux box at work. :-)
Wade.