Alternatives to SSH for tunnelling connections

I'm currently using COPSSH to tunnel various connections to a remote Windows box and connecting using plink.exe from the PUTTY suite. After connecting directly, I've come to realise that the quality of connection using this setup is appalling. Tunnelled connections appear to get slower and slower. Can anyone recommend secure tunnel software that is more performant than my current setup?

A UDP-based protocol will be more asynchronous than serializing over a tcp stream.

This should give OpenVPN better performance than OpenSSH on a lossy or high-latency network.

Two options that come to mind are stunnel (if you want something lightweight) and OpenVPN. Either should work just fine in windows, though I've never used either outside of a Linux/BSD environment, so I can't help out with any gotchas, recommendations, etc.

Stunnel (although I've only used it for connection encryption on MSWindows - on Linux running a tunnelled network connection runs like a clock).

I've heard good things about openvpn.

Do you need a tunnelled connection? i.e. have you considered IPSEC?

C.