I'm having a problem with my company's firewall and/or vpn server, it disconnects my connections if there is a long period of inactivity. I can solve that in putty, it allows to send periodic keep-alives and everything works fine. The problem is with other software that does not support this. Is there a way to force windows to send keep-alives for all connections?

PS: before you ask, my network admin says there is nothing he can do, if he increases the timeout it won't solve the problem, just delay it.