I decided I needed some time away from the problem. I knew I needed to get vncserver working locally but I thought the firewall rules were getting in the way. I could not tell from the error message who was refusing the connection since it looked like the same message I got when I was using ssh. After playing with vncserver on my xp box I decided to try and start the vncserver manually on the linux box. First I setup a password using vncpasswd. Then I started vncserver with the command, vncserver :1.  I was surprised to see a message saying it had created my profile in .vnc. I ran the vncviewer locally and it worked. I ran the vncviewer remotely through the ssh tunnel and it worked. The only problem was the twm display manager. I have a fondness for gnome.