we've used good ole remote desktop (plus a phone) for remote pairing with good success. i'm not sure i know how to set it up again, but it is possible to configure permissions to enable someone else to share the console desktop. they would log into the machine remotely and then ask for permission to share from the person sitting at the machine. the speed was great using a home cable modem.
I've been pondering this idea for about 2 years, making a VS package that would allow collaborative editing. We did this sort of thing back in the day with EMACS and X, and it was in fact very effective -- each user literally had a cursor on a shared buffer and was really editing.
I'd like to go over this one with you a bit more and get a sense to the features you'd find most interesting, since up until now I thought I was the only one interested in such a thing existing -- can you hit me on email wballard@mailframe.net
...oh here comes the spam
I've only done remote pairing once about 4 years ago at a small company (I've been pair programming for the last seven years at various companies). Most of us were on-site, but 1 team member was not. The remote pairing was painful, using VNC and some voice chat program (I forget which at the moment).
Admittedly, part of the pain was the lack of programming knowledge on the other end of the line.
Personally, I'd much rather have my partner in the same room - remote pairing just didn't feel like we were pairing. /shrug
RealVNC plus Skype works pretty well for us. Most days we pair in person, so there's a lot of implicit knowledge that carries over to the occassional remote pair sessions.