How do you mean VNC is painfully slow?

I have A DSL connection with only a 328K max upstream. You are correct in that I haven't played much with VNC on Linux. But loading anything besides TWM as the desktop just kills the connection.

I presume this comment isn't aimed at VNC?

Correct.

but should be possible with judicious application of Cygwin on the Windows end

Yeah, Cygwin is the Windows client I was hoping to avoid. X forwarding over SSH isn't bad as far as speed goes. I was just kind of hoping that there was an 'all in one' alternative.