Vista - Mystery of the missing VPN status icon

With searching I haven't found anything definitive on this. Does anyone know why the "Show icon in notification area when connected" option for VPN (PPTP) connections no longer exists in Vista? Is there a hack to get it back? The Network icon that can be enabled in Notification options is for the LAN connection. Through it you can connect/disconnect the VPN connection, but there's no independent VPN status icon anywhere that I've found.

Not having such an icon is more than an annoyance: you can very easily forget you're connected to the VPN.

its like bridging connections, since effectively with a VPN you are sharing connections with it, the only way i can think of is to enable it when you are using it and disable it when you are not, seems simple enough to me.

It just seems like an odd thing to remove, or make much more difficult to find, whichever is the case. I'm always forgetting that I'm connected, and it's not something you want to leave going longer than necessary since it can interfere with both your local network (in the case where local and remote addresses overlap) and the overall speed of your Internet connection.