Windows – Cisco VPN Client on Windows 7 64-bit

I've used Shrew Soft VPN and VPNC Front End as alternatives to Cisco's own client on Windows 7 x64. Both worked but I had to manually tweak the routing tables to when connecting from my home LAN.

Also, VPNC FE didn't work out of the box. It did when I installed OpenVPN TAP driver before it (downloaded OpenVPN, unchecked everything but the driver in its installation program).

It sounds like the Cisco VPN Client has been configured to block access to your local network and only provide network connectivity to the internal VPN network. This is normally done for security reasons to prevent bridging the networks together. As part of this it has set your DNS settings for the VPN to be the VPN LAN ones so that you can resolve DNS names of your company network hence your problem.

There will be an option to "Allow Local LAN access" in the VPN settings but that is normally administratively turned off. Here is a link showing you How to turn on Allow Local LAN Access but your VPN admins have probably locked that down to prevent it.