Thanks. NX looks interesting...I didn't realize it forwarded X so it should work with all X applications. Looks like you need a software component on both sides, though. If I want to run more robust X applications remotely in the future I will probably look into using this.

Pretty much any remote desktop solution (X, NX, VNC, etc) will work with all X applications...

In NX's case, it sort of acts as an X accelerator. Part of the speedup is from compression, but most of the speedup is from eliminating round-trips and doing things asynchronously.

It should be noted, though, that all solutions will require software on both sides... Plain X forwarding will require X and an SSH daemon on the remote side, and an X server and SSH client on the client side.

I'm not a windows user, so I'm not sure, but does putty support the "-c" flag for ssh? It forces the data to be compressed between the client and the server. Looking at your ltrace values, and your tcpdumps, it appears that it wouldn't help, but it also wouldn't hurt to try if it is available...