Turns out the problem was that vim on the remote was not compiled with GTK. This happened because the necessary package was not present on the remote box. Thus, even with the --enable-gtk2-check compile flag set, it was not actually including GTK.
To fix it, log on to the remote machine and:
- Install gtk2-devel,
- re-configure, re-make, & re-install vim
A co-worker figured this out eventually.
