When working in locations with really terrible net connections, one of the things I have resorted to is a VNC session that is a 1920x1200 desktop (256 color) tunneled inside SSH. In this setup the workstation's VNC client connects to a port on localhost that is SSH forwarded to the remote host. With the right SSH settings for timeout and keepalive it can be surprisingly usable. Then open up whatever application you have that is terrible on high-jitter/high-latency connections inside Chrome or Firefox, or as a native desktop app on the machine that is hosting the VNC session.
How would you get to having the right SSH settings for timeout and keep alive?
What I've done when using a slow connection is run emacs with w3m on a remote server and get the rendered text through SSH. I'm realizing more and more that a lot of our interfaces are more visual so I might try your method.
Either by pushing the settings from the ssh client (http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?topic=ssh_config) or by changing the settings on the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file of the machine that is both hosting the VNC server and hosting the ssh daemon.
