SSH, intermittent connections, Windows, ubuntu

[Eric S. Johansson]

this is one of those great border cases.

Just get a new laptop (Acer 8204) run speech-recognition great, real 
snappy response.  What's not so good is that on the slightest excuse, it 
will go into power conservation mode and shut down the WiFi connection. 
  Great for battery life especially if you are a Windows head and doing 
everything on the machine.  Not so good for ssh connections you want to 
keep alive for four or five days a time.

I think the solution involves using screen[1] in order to keep the 
application running on the ubuntu side after the ssh connection breaks.

One big Q is how can I preserve my "set of connections" and 
automatically reconnect to all of my remote hosts when I restore my WiFi 
connection?

one other big hope is that I will be able to reestablish/restore all of 
my X11 sessions as well.  I don't use too many of them but occasionally, 
it's unavoidable.

if I was going ubuntu to ubuntu, autossh would be an option but 
unfortunately, for some reason on this machine cygwin just won't install 
and I I can't afford to spend any time be on the two hours I have 
already.  (Yes, it's really puzzling, cygwin just works on with every 
Windows reinstall in the past on different machines.  I suspect it has 
something to do with installing on d:)

vnc is not an option because it consumes so much CPU that speech 
recognition becomes unreliable.

so any ideas for restoring connections on restart would be most welcome. 
  Also, if there was something like screen except its whole focus was on 
preserving a connection for reattachment and not multiple terminal 
windows, I would like to hear about that as well.

many thanks
--- eric

[1] first problem was screen is that it uses ^a to activate commands but 
I know I can fix that with remapping.  the second and potentially more 
obnoxious problem is that screws my scrollback buffer.