EggXpert

I keep telling you, you don't need to set up any port forwarding.  The only time you need to set up any port forwarding is if you have an incoming VPN client connection going to a VPN server sitting behind a firewall.  The fact you were able to set up a tunnel confirms everything is working.  Tweaking around any port forwarding rules is a total waste of time.  If even one of the ports wasn't passing through your Netgear, you would have zero VPN connectivity.

The address is the one you are putting into the port forwarding section, this is the address you are talking about.  If it is it should be the address you are using or your vpn is using to serve from your side/your computer.  So this should be your IP address of your notebook that is serving your side of the vpn,  I would think this but I haven't worked with vpn much.  This is what the router is asking though when it says server address, not the address of the server outside of your LAN.  IE server address equals local server address which is the address inside you local area network that is serving up the files.  Inside your local area network/LAN is anything connected to your side of the Netgear router.

From your manual you should be able to open up the Ipsec port 500 and the port 2001.  As far as the protocols of 50 and 51 then I don't think the router has specific settings available but as you said hopefully the firewall will handle it automatically. 

As ZX10 said though the vpn would not be working if all was not ok.   You might check the UPnP section of the router as it may have these ports already open through the OS,  if it is enabled UPnP then it actually should.

Just to clear some things up.  When you surf a website, do you have a port forward rule set up for port 80?  Of course you don't.  Launching a VPN connection from inside your network is no different.  A statefull firewall by default is going to allow any traffic from inside your network out to the internet and block any traffic initiated from the internet directed towards the inside of your network.  All firewalls are set up this way....DLink, Netgear, Linksys, and even all Cisco PIX/ASA firewalls.

OP, as I said, you stated you were able to get VPN connectivity.  You're complaining about slower internet performance while having the VPN tunnel up.  I asked you and you confirmed you are not running under split tunneling.  And I said everything seems normal for lower internet performance due to you having to go through your corporate network for internet connectivity and VPN overhead.

I fixed it, yep bought a Dlink DIR-655 router and now everything works great except for when whoever comes on line that used to knock my connection complety out now only slowes it down a bit.  I still have not confirmed if whoever that is is causeing my problem by using an extream amount of bandwidth on the overall network or if their router is just over powering my old Netgear router.

Regardless things work pretty good now after only one full day of use and testing, I am hoping it stays this way.

Thanks for all the good advice from you guys.  The steps I took to resolve this helped incramentally to make the situation better but the basic problem still remained after all the other issues were resolved.  I learned a lot and I am sure others will to when they come accross this thread.