It went pretty well. Took about an hour to setup and debug, but at the same time i was setting up ssh with keys for no password logins and xforwarding. Iirc all i really did was choose XDM as the session login manager, just because i know its setup better than the alternative, edited Xsetup and Xaccess and Xserver to allow logins and listen on a tcp port, i think i ran xhost +$OTHERMACHINESIP on both machines and deleted .Xauthority and .ICEauthority on the target machine, the one i was logging into.
What actually took the longest was finding out where XDM was getting its session information. One of the reasons i chose XDM to manage logins is that it will read .xsession or .xinitrc. It turns out that it was specifically configured NOT to do that on VL6. These are the kinds of distro specific shenanegans that drove me to Vector in the first place.
But yeah its running great now. but wow, i forgot how ugly XDM is

EDIT: this is one of the things i really love about linux, network transparency.