YaST updates very slow if VPN connected - both 12.3 and 13.1 KDE 32-bit

I was doing YaST online updates this morning on two different machines, one with openSUSE 12.3, one with 13.1, both KDE 32-bit. I usually run with a VPN connection, and get update transfer rates of around 1 MiB/s. Today during the "Refresh software repositories" step, transfer rates were around 1 KiB/s, down by a factor of 1024. When I disconnected VPN, rates went back to 1 MiB/s. VPN does not slow network traffic with browsers or e-mail, just YaST update. YaST did not show the entire repository URL (there was ... in the middle), so I do not know exactly which repositories did what. All were really slow, but some seemed worse than others.

Has something changed in some of the repositories recently? Has anyone else seen this?

Thanks,
Howard