Putty - and its lack of shell characters

[Irony]

After some searching around I issued this command which uses a 'tight' encoding;

vncviewer -encodings 'tight' localhost:5900

Another option is which uses 'copyrect tight hextile' which is 3 encodings plus an 8 bit colour scheme;

vncviewer -bgr233 -encodings 'copyrect tight hextile' localhost:5900

There are more options;

       vncviewer -help

<OPTIONS> are standard Xt options, or:
        -via <GATEWAY>
        -shared (set by default)
        -noshared
        -viewonly
        -fullscreen
        -noraiseonbeep
        -passwd <PASSWD-FILENAME> (standard VNC authentication)
        -encodings <ENCODING-LIST> (e.g. "tight copyrect")
        -bgr233
        -owncmap
        -truecolour
        -depth <DEPTH>
        -compresslevel <COMPRESS-VALUE> (0..9: 0-fast, 9-best)
        -quality <JPEG-QUALITY-VALUE> (0..9: 0-low, 9-high)
        -nojpeg
        -nocursorshape
        -x11cursor
        -autopass

http://www.tightvnc.com/vncviewer.1.php