Thanks to Chutz's technical wisdom and wizardry, he suggested a kernel module called shfsmount that mounts an ssh-ed account as a locally mounted directory. This totally fixes all my sftp-ing annoyances related to not being able to properly graphically navigate my remote shares on my cs.ubishops.ca account. shfsmount is awesome. Sorry I was a no-show at the LUG meeting tonight - there was a dinner down the hall that had priority.