White vinegar doesn't smell as the same as malt vinegar. Depending on your point of view, that could be good or bad.

Vinegar does have some natural disinfectant properties. If you want to use it, I would use it straight, not diluted. Then give it a quick rinse, but you do not need to be quite so thorough with rinsing it as you do with bleach. It will smell bad (more just very strong than truly bad), but it will dissipate fairly quickly as long as you have an area with good ventilation. I would not put the snakes back in until the strong odor was gone.

I use vinegar for a lot of household cleaning, and I've come to associate the faint hint of odor that gets left behind with cleanliness. It does a good job of eliminating bad odors, and doesn't leave behind those artificial scents that so many cleaning products do. Yuck.

However, with the snakes, why not go with chlorhexidene? I figure there has to be a reason why so many people use it and recommend it. I know you want to avoid "chemicals", but Derek is right that pretty much everything has chemicals in it. It is just a question of whether they are natural or artificial, and natural doesn't necessarily mean good.