My dad was asking me about a branch office solution where clients connected to the AD controller, but needed to VPN to get to the AD.  My preferred option is to either have a VPN on the router or a DC in the branch office, but failing both of those, perhaps this is the answer?

Starting a VPN automatically on boot with Windows XP

I recently needed to figure out how to make a Windows XP machine connect to a particular VPN automatically on reboot, before anyone logged into the machine. I eventually managed to assemble bits and pieces of information floating around the net into a working solution to the problem, but it wasn’t completely addressed in any single location, so I thought I’d stick the details in my blog for other people to Google and use (if you found this blog entry useful, please add a comment and let me know!).

The first thing I tried was to look for a property I could set on the VPN network connection to tell Windows that I wanted this connection to start automatically when the machine boots. I couldn’t find one; I doubt there is one.

<the details on how to fix this are in the blog at Something better to do » Blog Archive » Starting a VPN automatically on boot with Windows XP>

ttfn

David