Problems with VNC if Visual Effects are Enabled in Ubuntu
Ubuntu's default VNC server vino seems to have serious problems if you connect to it with visual effects enabled on the machine. At least with my configuration it only updates the remote host user interface once. Then the remote machine still reacts to clicks but I can't see the effect of the click.
One pragmatic solution to avoid this problem is to change the window manager for the duration of the VNC session. In Ubuntu for example you can use metacity --replace provided you want to use the default window manager (as of Ubuntu 10.04). This can easily be done remote via ssh directly before establishing the VNC connection.
If you use VNC quite often or you want to use visual effects over VNC you can try to replace vino with another VNC server to see if the problem goes away.
