I'm looking for Remote Desktop options to connect to my server running CentOS v. 5 from my WinXP machine at home.

Any recomendations?

yum install vnc-server
will give you vnc server just like on windows. also if you go to your
System | preferences | internet and network | Remote Desktop

there is a lite version installed by default

As said above, install vnc-server.

Remember to secure your vnc sessions to your server if you do, do this. I personally use SSH tunnels with putty to secure my vnc connections. Then you just need a VNC viewer like RealVNC or TightVNC.

as a note about VNC on windows localhost address 127.0.0.1 dose not work the VNC documentation
is wrong on this you need the IP address of the windows computer your running the VNC windoze computer

I don't know where that came from or what exactly that means?

If you set-up an SSH tunnel using say putty to tunnel ports 5901 from the windows machine to the VNC server then in VNC you have to use 127.0.0.1:5901 as the address to connect to, not including the port number will not work...

on the linux computer your right linux dose understand what local host is windoze dose not
(I can't understand how networking works at all on windoze with this kind of bug )
try it
when that fails use the IP address of the local windows computer as the forward to address

maybe it's been fixed by now but the only forward to address
I could get to work on windows was the IP address of the windows computer forwarding from linux to windoze

on windows ping 127.0.0.1 returns host not found
putty returns the same thing
in short windoze can't find it's own ass with both hands

edit
I just ran a ping 127.0.0.1 on a vis-stool computer it worked
it didn't work on XP
so maybe putty can use 127.0.0.1 on vis-stool

Strange, from experience, windows automatically listens to 127.xxx.xxx.xxx as local loopback connections and in browsers, if you type http://localhost it points at the box itself... So I don't understand what you are really on about I am afraid =/.

VNC is slow but I've been using it successfully. I'm now in the process of converting to FREENX instead of VNC.

You might look into a PuTTY and XMing setup. I use this to connect to Linux boxes from Windows boxes. It uses SSH and allows for X11 forwarding. This allows you to run nearly anything on your Windows box, remotely.