TL;DR: If the Cisco VPN client isn't working out for you for whatever reason, try a free VPN cient from Shrew Soft.
For a long time, we've been using a Debian linux based firewall at work, and OpenVPN for all our remote connection, God-dammit-they-are-bugging-me-on-vacation-again needs.
Our network admin, a really nice Russian guy, has since moved on to bigger and better things, and we hired a Cisco certified something-something (I hope I'm not coming across as disrespectful, this guy really knows his stuff, just don't know the proper term and can't be arsed to search for it) in his place. This resulted in our switching, unsurprisingly, to Cisco networking products.
I was thoroughly flabbergasted when I found out about vpnc, which I used on my home desktop (running FreeBSD at the time). I'd just run it, wait for about half a second, and that was that. Connection established. No waiting, no disc activity, no nothing. I was still using Cisco's client software on my Windows system.
When I upgraded my system a few weeks ago, I've opted to use 64-bit Windows since the amount of RAM has passed the magic number. I was pretty much prepared for some programs refusing to run (I was warned beforehand). Unfortunately, since Cisco VPN client is among those, I had to look for an alternative.
That is when I found these guys and their VPN client. Fast start, responsive, works on 64 bit windows. Pretty much all I wanted (though it still drops connection sometimes; can't help that one I guess). The ability to import Cisco's .pcf profiles (which it shares with vpnc, by the way) is also a nice feature.
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