Connection Manager Mind Twister

[Guest oturn]

On both of my Wi-Fi networks at home and work, I need to connect to dotless host names, such as hostname, instead of hostname.domain.com. I also have a VPN connection present in order to connect back to my home network when using GPRS. The VPN is set to connect from The Internet to Work (since there isn't an Internet to home option).

When I'm connected via Wi-Fi, using a dotless name causes my SP5 to assume I need access to the work network, so it attempts to connect through the VPN. To overcome this, I set my Wi-Fi network type to private/work network. Now the dotless names work on Wi-Fi, but the Internet doesn't! To overcome this, I entered a work URL exception of *.*/*, which routes all fully qualified domain names to the Wi-Fi's private/work network. Whew! So now via Wi-Fi, dotless names connect without attempting to use the VPN, and the Internet works. Great.

However!...because of the URL exception, the Internet doesn't work via GPRS, at least not until I change the GPRS connection to work. This is a reasonable solution until I try to connect back home from GPRS using the VPN. Since GPRS is set to the work network already, it doesn't bother to use the VPN. Each time I need to connect back home using GPRS/VPN, I have to manually change the connection type from work to Internet. It would be nice to avoid this step. Any suggestions?

I guess I partly needed to type all of this for some type of therapy, and partly to find out if I'm completely off base, and if there's a better way of doing this.