Snow leopard and VPN proxy settings

Hi all, relatively new Mac user here and am loving my new Air with Snow Leopard, but I'm getting killed by an issue with VPN and proxy settings.

We use a pac file at work and I have the proxy set up for my airport to use http://whatever/pacfile. Safari works at home (when http://whatever is inaccessible) and in the office (when it is). However, if I am at home, Safari works fine when using my internet connection but once I VPN in, it tells me I am not connected to the internet. Note that I can access work resources including email fine, navigate my work network and intranet to my heart's content, etc. If I go to the diagnostics, I can only choose Airport or Other - there is no option for the VPN adapter. Airport is already set with the pac file, and I haven't screwed with Other, since I'm not really sure what I would put there to tell it to use the VPN adapter.

I tried unapplying the pac setting and reapplying it, thinking maybe it just tries to load the pac once and needed to reapply it, but that didn't work.

Firefox with that pac file manually set in the preferences works under all scenarios above with no manual adjustment. So the easy answer is to use Firefox, except I have an internet hosted app that, of course, works on or off my company network and uses the same settings that safari uses.... So I'm screwed when I work from home, which is most of the time, since I telecommute. Please help me not to use remote desktop for that app since if I do, I'll end up using that VDI interface for everything, which is the exact opposite of my goal.

I have googled this and found these (among others), which are identical to my issue, but no solution or FAQ yet... Anyone know?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2135381?messageID=10083809

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2168407?threadID=2168407

Thanks in advance!