Comment 8 for bug 145107

Same here. I remember this issue being in 7.10 also. Basically, unless the interface is in "roaming mode", you cannot create or connect to VPN connections. This forces you to use DHCP since NetworkManager provides no facility to manually change an IP address (which is unfortunate because even network-admin doesn't want to apply IP address setting half the time and adding or changing a domain name causes all kind of problems). True, you can set your IP address using ifconfig and set the default gateway from the terminal, but that shouldn't have to be done. I should not have to tell clients to touch the terminal and run some commands they don't know just to get on the internet.

For this bug to be fixed, NetworkManager needs to manage PPTP connections regardless of whether or not the interface is in roaming mode (I don't even know what that means. How is "roaming mode" different than DHCP?). An even better solution would be to have NetworkManager set manual IP addresses when you click on "Manual Configuration..." and continue to manage the interface instead of passing it on to that steaming load of dung, network-admin (which has come a long way, but is horribly unreliable). network-admin should be dropped and all connections, manual or otherwise, should be handled by NetworkManager. The name "NetworkManager" implies that it will handle all your network settings. It should be named "DHCPManager" (since that's really all it manages) if this isn't going to be fixed.

Totally user-unfriendly and unintuitive IMHO.