Well this took so long to figure out the little hurtles that it is going to be worth writing it all out. I am so grateful to all the people who have taken the time to post their solutions to this incredibly messy job of creating a Virtual Private Network.
I have used a Win98 PC connected to a Linksys BEFSX41 VPN IPsec-PassThrough router which was connected to a Cable Broadband modem.
I also used a TheGreenBow VPN Client on an IBM Thinkpad connected through a 56k dialup phone connection.
Thats what I tested with.
There were three main stumbling blocks that took hours of tweaking around to learn how to overcome. One was discovering a reasonable VPN Client. One was getting the BEFSX41 VPN settings to match the TheGreenBox VPN Client settings. Another was adjusting the network settings for the dialup connections (that was so it had NetBios and Windows file sharing).
I’m way too tired to finish this today but I wanted to get a start.