SSH Frequently Asked Questions
With OpenSSH, X forwarding works for some applications, but not others!
The programs that don't work may be using a broken or old version of Xlib that doens't pay attention to the XAUTHORITY environment variable. Try:
cp $XAUTHORITY ~/.Xauthority
Note that you may transmit your xauth key in cleartext over the network by
doing this if your home directory is remote; avoiding that is part of why
OpenSSH keeps them under /tmp
to begin with.