Date:        Tue, 11 Mar 2003 00:28:55 -0800 (PST)
    From:        Bsd Neophyte <bsdneophyte@yahoo.com>
    Message-ID:  <20030311082855.47316.qmail@web20109.mail.yahoo.com>

  | i don't know if it matters, but i have the host ip address in the hosts
  | file.

What's in your nsswitch.conf file

If it contains:
	hosts:          dns files
then your hosts file won't be being looked at until after the DNS
lookup fails (in which case, you should probably find out what's
wrong with the DNS servers).

It can also just be key generation time if you're on a slow system
(I've seen ssh (v2) take minutes to start on oldish sparc servers).

kre