Can no longer connect to PPTP VPN on 13.04

Can no longer connect to PPTP VPN on 13.04

I recently upgrade my 12.04 desktop installation to 12.10 and then to
13.04 hoping that my problems with VPN would disappear. I can't put my
finger on when, but in 12.04, I just started noticing that the PPTP
service was crashing every 2-5 minutes, making VPN essentially unusable.
Finding nothing satisfying in the forums, I decided to be a little more
bold and upgrade - both to check out the new version and hopefully have
VPN automatically be repaired. By the way, it's been working great until
just recently on 12.04 and it doesn't work at all now.
So, it's completely and inexplicably broken on 13.04. It seems that the
pppd daemon is just gone. Hunting down how to reinstall it didn't yield
much of anything. There were Launchpad bugs reported related to this but
no resolution.
Here's my syslog when I try to connect. As you can see, it doesn't even
start now:
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <info> Starting VPN service
'pptp'...
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <info> VPN service 'pptp'
started (org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp), PID 6436
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <info> VPN service 'pptp'
appeared; activating connections
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <info> VPN plugin state
changed: init (1)
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <info> VPN plugin state
changed: starting (3)
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <info> VPN connection
'Strong PPTP' (Connect) reply received.
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <warn> VPN connection
'Strong PPTP' failed to connect: 'Could not find the pppd binary.'.
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <info> Policy set 'The 'Net'
(eth0) as default for IPv4 routing and DNS.
Oct 1 15:07:20 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <warn> error disconnecting
VPN: Could not process the request because no VPN connection was active.
Oct 1 15:07:26 Shuttle NetworkManager[1011]: <info> VPN service 'pptp'
disappeared
I'll do what it takes to get this working, but this seems so fundamental
to the OS. Any ideas?
Why would this be so hard to repair?