Hi, First a hearty thank you to all that replied to my conundrum. Here is how I got past the problem of my (FreeBSD 5.3 Release) OpenSSH's "sshd" key errors, not loading at startup: 1) I had an incorrect line in /etc/rc.conf. One problem for me was an incorrect path to the program. The correct lines that mattered were: sshd_program=/usr/sbin/sshd sshd_enable="YES" 2) I also did not have correct keys generated for the sshd aplication. Based upon your helpful e-mails and the man pages I found the following worked just fine to create the SSHV2 dsa host key: ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key 3) Also, based upon recommendations I turned off DNS lookup by my sshd server in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. UseDNS no All is well here and my adventure helps someone else some day. Correcting these problems got my Putty and WinSCP connections down to around 2-3 seconds (from around 80-90 seconds). Thanks again for the excellent advice from WLUG, Joel Desrochers