Note to self:
tightvnc, and probably realvnc, default to 8 bit color depth when starting a new server. VMWare workstation frowns on this and wants more. You can either start vncserver with '-depth 16' or edit vncserver (it's a perl script) and change line 36 to "$depth = 16;".
Also note that you can get emacs to display all its pretty colors with M-x list-color-display.
That is all.