pop-agent isn't doing X intrinsically; it's spawning an xterm to ask for the password. (At some point I hope to switch this to ssh-askpass, but when I originally wrote pop-agent it was running on a machine that didn't have that installed.)

If it were doing X internally it would be ten times as ghastly a program as it already is! :-)

Remote xbiff would be a solution, I suppose, but somehow I don't like the idea of having remote programs started automatically when my X session comes up. Local programs that attempt to make network connections, fine; actual remote programs make me nervous.