Thanks again for the suggestions everyone, I've decided to try another VPN solution since Windows 7 VPN doesn't seem to offer me enough control over its connection.

@lmckenzie: thanks for posting the MAX tutorial, it's all videos so I'll have to go through it when I get back home.

@timarender: interesting tidbits about both TCP and UDP ports being used, good information to know if I end up having to forward those ports though whatever solution I get working; and of course more knowledge about the QM communication workings on the whole is a good thing.

I did find some posts on SSH tunneling but all they do is turn UDP packets into TCP packets and back again; this would only route render jobs to a single destination rather than broadcasting to what could potentially be a farm of EC2 instances.

I'm gonna try using OpenVPN, it looks promising because it has a config file I can modify that has a lot of granularity as to how the connection is setup, including subnets to broadcast to and bridging capability to allow those broadcasts through the VPN.

More to come...