Yup. You are describing the most common complaint about all VPNs. Every time I talk to someone and tell them that I work for a company that makes VPN software, they have exactly the same complaint.

The setting you looked up, the "allow connection to local LAN", is the correct thing to be looking for. However, as you've also found, the company's VPN server has control over that feature. Their reasoning is this:

If the company allowed you to communicate on your local LAN simultaneously with the company LAN, then suddenly your computer becomes a possible unprotected gateway, sort of a "back door", between the protected company network and the rest of the world, thus defeating the original purporse of the VPN's security. Since the company has no control over how secure your home LAN is, most companies don't allow this.

You have three options here:

- Convince the company to assign what's called a "policy" to that PC which allows it to connect to the local LAN for the purposes of printing.

- Briefly bypass the VPN connection while you're printing, and reconnect to the VPN when you're done printing. I don't know how Cisco's VPN client handles it, but ours has a tray icon which lets you do this with a couple of clicks on its fly-out menu. Takes only a second.

- Connect the computer directly to the printer via a USB cable.