I think you're looking in the wrong direction. There are two aspects to consider: the security of your laptop, and the security of your connections.
For the security of your connections, what matters is that you are using SSL (or TLS — treat it as a synonym of SSL) with a correct certificate. An HTTPS connection means HTTP (the usual web protocol) over SSL. SSL provides end-to-end confidentiality and integrity protection, so it doesn't matter whether you are browsing from a “secure” network or from a public wifi hotspot.
What does “correct certificate” mean? A certificate is a website's “identity card”, providing a cryptographic means for your browser to verify that the website is who it claims to be. If the certificate verification didn't happen, you would have no way to know whether the SSL connection was going to the legitimate website or to a man-in-the-middle. In a good first approximation, you need to check three things to know that you have a secure connection to the desired website:
- The URL must begin with
https://, and browsers will typically show a padlock icon next to the URL.
- If you see any scary warning, the connection is not secure. (A scary warning could be due to server misconfiguration too, and this is unfortunately more common than it should be. But if you see a scary warning when attempting to connect to your bank, I don't advise bypassing the warning.)
- You must be connecting to the right URL in the first place. This means you should always connect to your bank from a bookmark, not by typing the URL (risk of typo) and never ever by clicking in an email or web link that you're not 200% sure comes from the bank (42nd National Bank is probably not a legitimate site).
A VPN doesn't add much security over an HTTPS connection. A VPN protects the connection from your laptop to the VPN endpoint, which includes the point at which attacks are most likely (the local network where your laptop is plugged into or the wifi hotspot that it's connected to), but HTTPS provides end-to-end confidentiality and integrity anyway. VPNs have their uses, but they're esentially irrelevant for web banking:
- An enterprise VPN connects your laptop to your enterprise network. The main point is to make securing the enterprise network a lot easier: anyone trying to connect to a server on the enterprise network must have passed some form of authentication already, either physically on the premises or logically by possessing the VPN key/password.
- A VPN can provide a bit of privacy at the location where your laptop is connecting from: anyone snooping there will only see your VPN traffic as a whole, instead of individual connections which are undecipherable (if using SSL correctly) but whose endpoint is clearly identified.
- A VPN can let you connect to sites that are blocked by an enterprise, ISP or government firewall, as long as those sites are visible from the VPN endpoint.
As far as securing a connection from your laptop is concerned, WEP and WPA(2) are completely irrelevant. They are technologies for securing a wifi access point; a laptop connecting to that access point doesn't benefit from them in any useful fashion.
IPsec, SSL/TLS, SSH can be technologies underlying a secure connection such as a VPN, but they're not really relevant at your level. They compete on ease of set up, possibility of piercing through firewalls, performance, but not on security.
DNSSEC today isn't widely deployed. Until then, assume that DNS is insecure, and rely on SSL to tell you whether you're connecting to the right site. Connection hijacking could happen at the IP level anyway.
Finally, none of these are relevant to securing your computer against external or internal attacks. For external attacks tried by someone on the local network, what matters is not what protocols you actively use but what protocols you have open on your machine. The defense is not to run services that you don't use, to have sane firewall settings (most laptops don't need to accept any form of incoming connection) and to keep your operating system and applications up to date. The biggest attack vector nowadays is through content that you have retrieved, e.g. a web page that attempts to exploit a bug in your web browser. The defense against these is not to download risky files such as executable, to avoid browsing dodgy sites or clicking on links in suspicious emails, and to keep your operating system and applications up to date.