Revisiting vnc - want to put some notes here for myself.
Installed tightvncserver and xtightvncviewer on sid. As you said, it's easy to use. One major difference I see is that with x11vnc, you connect to the existing display, and with tightvncserver, you get a separate display. With tight, you can connect to the remote host, start some program, close the connection, and then come back to it later, and it'll still be running. (You can do that with x11vnc, too, but it will be on the same display that someone sitting at the remote host sees.) So, if you want to use vnc to do technical support for a friend, x11vnc seems like the way to do it. (There are probably other ways to do it.)
I tried doing tightvnc over ssh tunnel, and I can connect, but all I see is a gray field instead of the desktop. Might play with this some more, but right now, I would only use tightvnc on my local network. To do it over the internet without the ssh tunnel seems risky.
Third note: In the past few months, I've had a few occasions to use vnc to connect to my own computer when I was at a friend's house. The scripts I wrote didn't work, and I had to issue the commands manually. I haven't tried troubleshooting yet.