I'll look into the VNC, as I think this might be what I am after.
I think, Ugge, you may have misunderstood my badly worded question
At the moment I do startx on my laptop and it starts with xterm rather than a window manager and I do :
ssh -XC 192.168.1.1
and start everything remotely, via my PLIP connection (things run on my desktop PC and are displayed on my laptop ). What I wanted was to be able to look-in on a X session already running on the desktop computer.
Thank-you