I am new to Linux, so please pardon my ignorance on the basics.

I want to be able to run an X Window session from my PC that is running XP. I have access to my Linux machine over my wireless network and I can connect to it from my laptop PC using Putty - now this is about as far as I can get without some help.

I know there are some Windows apps made for this purpose, I don't know which to use and what they need as far as configuration for me to achieve my goal.

Any guidance on the next steps would be appreciated.

If I understand you correctly, you want to run an X11 application on your Linux machine, tunnel it through SSH and let the display appear on your XP machine.

I only did that once, just to play around with it, and it's years ago...

* There are several X11 implementations for Microsoft Windows, but most of them are non-free and quite expensive. I have forgotten which one I tried, but it wasn't a full version either.

I guess, Cygwin/X is a good choice, but never tried it:
http://x.cygwin.com

* On your Linux machine, enable ssh to do X11 forwarding in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
X11Forwarding yes

Then ssh to your Linux machine and log in. Having done so, you have to set the shell variable DISPLAY to export your X display to your XP machine with Cygwin/X.
Given your XP box's hostname is xpbox and the network is homelan, then type $ export DISPLAY=xpbox.homelan:0
Henceforth, every X application should be displayed on your Windows box

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If you want your whole Linux desktop to appear on your XP machine, just use VNC, it's available for both Windows and Linux.

cheers

Thanks for the help.

The cygwin implementation is quite bloated and hard to configure. There are a number of projects that bring along only those parts of cygwin required for the task.

The openSSH project did this, but it is not being developed and has old, insecure components.

The one to use for ssh is copSSH, it configures everything near perfect right out of the box, including being able to shell into windows with the use of password-less keys. This allows for automated backups initiated by a Linux server, a holy grail I'd been working on for months until someone pointed me at copSSH.

cat