i can actually give this a more thorough response later on (remind me, you're good at that) but in the mean time the most shocking thing i read here is that you think you need to use a laptop to control a desktop.

why aren't you using your phone as a remote? you have an iphone, right? i'm pretty sure there are a multitude of apps that will do that for you. phone then becomes mouse AND keyboard, is much smaller and less annoying than VNC on a laptop. i don't know about iphone apps but gmote will even let you specify paths on your gmote server computer-side so that you can just browse to files with the phone app's interface (way faster if you have to squint to see the mouse moving around on your tv).