So it's been about a month now i think and as of about 10 minutes ago I finally think I solved everything and am VERY happy.
The main issue has been 'porting' my corporate environment to the XP installation under Parallels, the final problem with RSA software tokens etc has just been solved, after many hours of messing about with IT i figured out that it's a time clock thing as I hadn;t noticed before that XP was changing the time to GMT+8 all the time even though the timezone on MAC OS X was changed and so was XP, after a bit of digging aorund I found the Parallels Tools option and unchecked the 'maintain difference between guest os' option, now it stays set and VPN works again !
Since the new firmware I don;t get any mooing but if i plug my external monitor in and run XP on one and MAC on the other the fan goes mental on screensaver mode which is annoying but i can live with it for the convenience
One last little thing to do is sort out GPRS/3G dialup for it but for that i need to get a decent phone....
