The CPU in the 8200 is a lot more powerful so you see the widget usage in the 1100 far more. That is especially so because the refresh rate can start to hit the time taken to pull the data.

Did you try the patch linked above to revert to the previous widget behaviour?

@breusshe I ended up finding a setting that was different between my old vpn setup and the vpn company setup for 2.5. I changed that and everything suddenly worked.

I still can't really explain why though. The entire time my VPN would connect but it did not appear to route traffic. No log entries that I could find that told me what was happening on that end either.